Homecoming: Horrifying Pinter Piece

Recently, I saw The Homecoming at The Young Vic Theatre. In full transparency, I didn’t pay for my ticket and I saw it with my sister. These are important to note. 

I don’t have much experience with Pinter and know very little about his writing style. I saw Betrayal before the Pandemic and enjoyed it very much. But this play I had never heard of. I mainly went because it was free. 

The stage was transformed to a living room, nice enough stage design but it wasn’t anything groundbreaking. That’s fine, not everything has to turn theatre on it’s head. It was a large stage that still felt incredibly claustrophobic and for some unexplained reason, the room was filled with smoke. As soon as the smoke tumbled into the space, everyone started coughing. I, personally, seen very little need for haze. Unless it’s for an explosion, I do not see any reason for it’s use. I’m sure I could get all arty and say that the family dynamic was like a ticketing time bomb but, that’s still not a good reason to use it. The room was filled with haze. Already off to a shaky stat and the play hadn’t even started. 

There were some trigger warnings for this play; abuse, prostitution, mentioning of drugs, smoking. A fairly intense list. However, they left one vital trigger warning out, which I will get to. 

The play started with the famous “Pinter Pause”. For what seemed like 3 minutes, Lenny (Joe Cole) sat downstage right, reading a newspaper in a spotlight. Okay, I thought, let’s see where this might be going. 

What followed was a family drama about a father, Max (Jared Harris), who was loosing his grip on his family or something. To be entirely honest, I zoned out multiple times. The main point was that Teddy (Robert Emms) came back home from America with his new wife, Ruth (Lisa Diveney). Teddy hadn’t told his family that he got married and the family haven’t seen him in a while. That’s the main story. Where it gets totally unhinged is when Ruth, starts flirting with all the family and reveals that she’s a sex worker. Okay, cool, I guess. Interval. Lot’s of emotions to process. 

In the interval, I felt like this play was going to get bad. Like really bad. 

The whole of act two was the brothers “taking turns” on Ruth. Tasteful. The first in line was Joey (David Angland), and the brothers and father discuss pimping Ruth out. Teddy is the only one that’s slightly against it. 

The show ends with Teddy leaving Ruth and, thus, their marriage and the remaining men panting and caressing Ruth while Sam (Nicolas Tennant), the uncle, has a heart attack and dies. Fade to black. Applause. Sure. 

The play is about power. How Max is slowly loosing it too his son Lenny and then Lenny and everyone looses it to Ruth. She holds all the power at the end of the show. But the question has to be asked, did this play really need to be staged? 

I know in this “woke” era, it’s easy to be uncomfortable with this story. But a crucial element was missed. The empowerment that Ruth has by deciding what she does with her body. I feel like with eh scope of theatre and the amount of interesting, and pressing, stories we need to be telling. This was not one of them. It’s a classic, sure, but I think we shouldn’t be afraid too say that not all classics need to be staged. We don’t need four male characters on stage pimping out the only female character. Spouting abusing language and threatening her with sexual assault. We don’t need it. 

This viewing was particularly worrying since there were a bunch of young drama school students where they were bellowing with laughter. And one of them said afterwards, “That was fucking hilarious, I loved it.” Excuse me? Did we just watch the same thing? Two hours of a woman getting pimped out by her in-laws? What part of this was funny? I didn’t laugh once so I don’t know if I missed something here! 

I think this just highlights the responsibility on theatre programmers and artistic directors to provide, not only a compelling story and exciting theatre, but to represent the society around us. Showcasing stories that us, as a society, need to hear/see. 

Forgetting the core point of representing our society, theatre will continue to be slightly disappointing. The theatre landscape is missing a provocative edge it used to have. Only one show held onto that edge and I was only running for a short while. (Accidental Death of An Anarchist) 

In conclusion, this production felt misguided and mis-timed. I would not recommend this production to a friend nor do I think that we, as a wider audience, need any more Pinter plays.