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REVIEW: Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at York Theatre Royal, until Saturday

Sticking it to them: Keith Allen’s cruel patriach Max pours scorn on sons Teddy (Sam Alexander), left, and Lenny (Mathew Horne)

Theatre Royal Bath presents The Homecoming, York Theatre Royal, 7.30pm, tonight; 2.30pm and 7.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

KEITH Allen, actor and comedian, reckons Jamie Glover’s revival of Harold Pinter’s bewildering 1965 psychodrama is the funniest of his three acquaintances with The Homecoming, spread over 25 years.

That assessment just adds to the puzzle emanating from Pinter’s fantasist family wars. Funny, you say, Keith? Well, not as in funny ha-ha, but darkly, bitterly humorous in its jaw-dropping mind games, sexual power plays and gruff misogyny, even more uncomfortable to observe in this age of #MeToo and heightened gender politics.

As a programme note forewarns, Pinter gave short shrift to “any director or actor who dared to ask him what a line or a scene might actually mean”. You may well be on the side of those befuddled actors and directors, feeling cast adrift on a sea of ambiguity, unsure of what is going on, maybe incredulous too, and yet somehow still fascinated by the shenanigans unfolding.

It turns out Noel Coward was a fan, writing to Pinter after experiencing the convention-smashing, fragmented, disturbing The Homecoming. “You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in, except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second,” The Master voiced.

Urbane airs: Mathew Horne’s smooth operator pimp Lenny in The Homecoming

“I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to explain anything, and the arrogant but triumphant demands you make on the audience’s imagination,” he enthused.

There you have it: the “resolute refusal to explain anything”. Over the years, that baton has been passed to the theatre critic, student and historian, and this particular critic has too often found his Pinter to be half empty, rather than half full, frustrating rather than fulfilling, a night to endure, more than enjoy.

Glover’s production, however, is a more rewarding encounter, the mystery, menacing comedy and muscular machismo language brought to the boil by a superb cast on a memorably distorted set design by Liz Ascroft.

Yes, you have to work hard; yes, you have to use your imagination, and yes, The Homecoming still carries its shock value, no longer the angry young man shock of the new; more, ‘did he just say that?’…’did she just do that’, but that is because the cast as one commits to Pinter’s “pause and effect” rhythm of language and its subsequent verbal punch.

Keith Allen’s Max: A cantankerous King Leer

Having played Teddy in 1997 and Uncle Sam in 2015, Keith Allen graduates to patriarch Max, the retired butcher who still rules the North London family house with a simmering temper from his armchair, using his walking stick as much to threaten violence as to hobble around the living room.

Max, a cantankerous King Leer, sets the mood, switching without warning from vicious viper to florid sentimentality, belittling his brother, quietly resolute chauffeur Sam (Ian Bartholomew), and winding up his sons with his bragging.  

The middle son, sarky pimp mobster Lenny (Mathew Horne), and youngest son, slow-headed, slow-footed aspiring boxer Joey (Geoffrey Lumb) have never left home despite Max’s derision. Like father, like son, all three are deluded, unhinged.

The one who did break away, eldest son Teddy (Sam Alexander), is a smug philosophy professor at an American university with educated airs and a cultivated voice. Without warning, he is paying a visit to show off his wife, mysterious, unpredictable, stultified former model Ruth (Shanaya Rafaat).

Family tensions: Warring Sam Alexander’s Teddy, left, and Mathew Horne’s Lenny with Ian Bartholomew’s mediator, Uncle Sam

This is a change-resistant house devoid of female presence since Max’s wife died, and Ruth becomes a pawn in a power struggle of toxic masculinity. Or does she, because amid the appalling misogyny, in a world where all the men talk, but none of them listens in games of one-upmanship, she is the one who does exactly that and then makes her play, picking them off in turn, as she breaks free from smug Teddy’s condescending control.  

It is said the word is all in a Pinter play, but here director Glover, designer Ascroft and lighting designer Johanna Town have a vital impact, at once physical and visual. Glover uses choreographed movement, a sudden change of posture, as the prelude to a mood switch; Ascroft has built a house interior that is worn, faded, stale, but is also stretched beyond reality with high walls and an endless staircase, bringing a sense of warped perspectives and being trapped.

Town’s lighting switches from drab domestic ordinariness to gothic shadows or flashes brightly on and off to reveal characters in different positions from before to indicate a juddering shift in the play’s tectonic plates.  

Leave the pauses and disdainful social comments to the deconstructionist Pinter, and he leaves you to fill in the narrative gaps, to cling onto the coat tails of non-sequitur conversations and to make sense of it all…or not. He is playing with us, toying with us, ever the agent provocateur out of love with man’s foibles and failings, our idiocy and crassness. Is it funny? The joke is on us.  

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Keith Allen plays The Homecoming to the Max in third role in Pinter’s brutal comedy

Keith Allen as brutal patriarch Max, ruling his sons with threats and violence, in The Homecoming

KEITH Allen is completing a hattrick of roles spread over 25 years in Harold Pinter’s darkly comic power struggle The Homecoming, on tour at York Theatre Royal from tonight.

At the National Theatre, in 1997, the Welsh actor, comedian, television presenter, documentary maker and rousing punk musician played university professor Teddy, returning from America with his wife Ruth to find his two brothers, Joey and Lenny, and elderly father Max still living at their North London family home.

In 2015, at the Trafalgar Studios, London, he was cast as Uncle Sam. “Now I’m playing Max but that’s as far as I can go because I’m too old to play Joey or Lenny,” says Keith, 68. “Max is the patriarch of a very misogynistic household. Every character is repressed to the nth degree but while most of them repress their rage Max doesn’t.

“He had a very interesting relationship with his now-dead wife that has coloured his whole life and he’s in a household where they’re all playing games and trying to top each other. Everything that’s done is for a reason and it’s usually to get one over on someone else.”

Keith compares former butcher Max to a raging sheep: “If you’ve ever been in a field with a very angry tup, you don’t want to be there. I’ve been there and they don’t back down.”

Director Jamie Glover and actor Mathew Horne, who is playing pimp Lenny, always had Allen in mind for their Pinter project “They’re close mates, and the genesis of the idea to do a Pinter play came from them. They took their idea to Danny Moar at [the Theatre Royal] Bath, originally wanting to do The Caretaker, but the Pinter estate offered the rights to The Homecoming instead.”

Glover and Horne were unsure whether Allen would want to return to Pinter’s 1965 fractured family drama, but “Max is a part I’ve always had my eye on,” says Keith. “I was very lucky to be offered it and I’m very pleased to be doing it.”

After all, The Homecoming is considered to be Pinter’s finest work in its exploration of toxic masculinity, stultifying patriarchy, one-upmanship feuds and sexual powerplays. “I’ve always thought Pinter was a poet before he was a playwright and the poetry is amazing. This whole play is about language and very particular choices of words, which is why as an actor you have to be very on-the-ball about the grammar.

Keith Allen’s Max, seated, and Mathew Horne’s Lenny, centre, in The Homecoming

“I think the lyricism of the play is extraordinarily attractive and the tension has people constantly going, ‘What on earth is happening and what’s going to happen next?’.”

Keith praises not only the writing, but the “brilliant structure” too, describing it as a feat of engineering. “As an actor, you just get your skis on and let the skis guide you,” says the skiing enthusiast.

What does Keith recall of his first performance in The Homecoming? “That was in 1997, directed by Roger Michell, who died last September, bless him. I remember feeling I’d let the cast down in rehearsals, as I would forget my lines, make things up and trip my way through it, playing Teddy to Lindsay Duncan’s Ruth.

“But I got a handle on it in the end, and it was a brilliant way to learn about being still on stage, which is a great skill to master, when a lot of actors get scared if they’re not doing anything.”

Comparing the productions, Keith says: “I have to say that all three have had very different qualities. This one is very funny, much funnier than the other two, because the director chose that path. Jamie Lloyd’s production in 2015 was much bleaker; this one is genuinely funny but also very discerning.

“A hefty contributory factor to that humour is that these men are idiots. They’re fantasists, all trying to be top dog, and that’s funny to watch.”

Assessing The Homecoming’s impact on audiences in 2022, by comparison with 1965, Keith says: “Misogyny is very present in the play, as is generational jealousy within a family. The mother is dead but she looms very large in everyone’s memory, especially Max’s because he loathed her.

“When the play was first performed, I don’t think anyone had seen anything quite so vicious and measured before. Now it’s interesting for different reasons because we’re living in a time where women are becoming far more recognised and are on a far more equal footing.

“As an actor, you just get your skis on and let the skis guide you,” says Keith Allen of the art of performing in a Pinter play

“There are things in the play that could be misconstrued as being abusive to women and, because of the times we’re living in, audiences might react very quickly to certain things which they wouldn’t necessarily have reacted to before.”

Keith has “previous” for Pinter, not only appearing in The Homecoming but also in Pinter 3: Landscape/A Kind Of Alaska in the West End and The Celebration and The Room, both directed by Pinter himself at the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2000 and in New York in 2001. 

“You very quickly realised that Harold chose people for what they could do; he was very careful in his casting,” Keith recalls. “He wouldn’t ask you to act a part, but to ‘be’, so he left you alone and watched.”

As for Pinter’s advice on his notorious use of pauses, “he once quite frivolously said to us, ‘if the pauses don’t work, **** it’, but actually they do work,” says Keith. “It works like a musical score in that what comes before dictates what comes after. It’s all about rhythm.”

After a five-year hiatus, Keith will enjoy his return to York, where he was last seen on stage as Inspector Rough in Patrick Hamilton’s thriller Gaslight at the Grand Opera House in February 2017. ” York is lovely because you’re near the river and there are some lovely pubs,” he says.

“I really like touring. I like the fact that you’re on the move and it’s as if you’re having an opening night every week because you’re in a different space, in a different theatre, with a different ambience.

” I like to fit in some golf wherever I go and I have an ingrained curiosity about corrugated iron chapels and buildings, so I always see if I can find one or two to go and have a look at.”

Theatre Royal, Bath, presents Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, York Theatre Royal, tonight until Saturday; 7.30pm, plus 2pm, Thursday; 2.30pm, . Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk

Keith Allen as Inspector Rough and Kara Tointon as Bella Manningham in Gaslight at the Grand Opera House, York, in February 2017
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Mathew Horne sees the funny side of Pinter’s brutal dysfunctional family drama The Homecoming at York Theatre Royal

Mathew Horne’s Lenny, right, with Keith Allen’s Max, seated, in a scene from Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming

GAVIN & Stacey star Mathew Horne has performed on a York stage only once before, appearing in The Catherine Tate Show Live show at York Barbican.

“We started the tour there. It must be five years ago,” he recalls, ahead of being joined by Keith Allen and Ian Bartholomew in Jamie Glover’s touring production of Harold Pinter’s fractious family drama The Homecoming at York Theatre Royal from May 16 to 21.

“I know York very well from going on school trips from my hometown of Nottingham, though I don’t know the Theatre Royal itself, but I’m assured by our director that it’s beautiful with very good audiences.”

Mathew initially had hoped to be touring opposite Allen in another Pinter work, The Caretaker, rather than The Homecoming, his bleakly humorous exploration of family and relationships, premiered in the West End in 1965 before winning four Tony Awards on Broadway in 1967, including Best Play.

“Really the whole seed of the idea came from myself and director Jamie Glover, an actor-director colleague and friend of mine,” says Mathew.

“We had wanted to do a play for a while, and Keith had done an episode of Agatha Raisin [the Sky One series in which Horne plays Roy Silver]. I’ve known  him for 15 years, and he came on and did a guest part.

“Just after that, I did a film called Bolan Shoes with Timothy Spall, which will be out at the end of this year. I got talking to him about the last play he’d done, The Caretaker, and I thought, ‘hang on, I’d love to play Aston in that with Keith as the Caretaker’.”

“The Homecoming is at times hysterically funny, but at other times sickeningly vile,” says Mathew Horne, left

Mathew duly took the idea to Glover, with the aim of mounting a production at the Theatre Royal, Bath. “But the rights weren’t available,” he recalls. “However, we could do The Homecoming, because it was offered to us by Harold Pinter’s estate.

“I thought, ‘that’s going to be a problem because Keith has done it twice already, the last time seven years ago.”

Indeed, Allen had played university professor Teddy at the National Theatre in 1997 and chauffeur Sam at London’s Trafalgar Studios in 2015. “I called him anyway, and Keith said he’d always wanted to play Max [retired butcher, brutal patriarch and Teddy’s father], which slightly blindsided me, but I was delighted.”

In Pinter’s coruscating play, university professor Teddy returns from America in 1965 with his wife Ruth to find his find his elderly father, uncle and brothers still living at their childhood home in North London, whereupon life becomes a barely camouflaged battle for power and sexual supremacy fought out with taut verbal brutality.

Amid the men’s struggle for power and one-upmanship, who will emerge victorious in this misogynistic cauldron: the poised and elegant Ruth or her husband’s dysfunctional family?

Mathew takes the role of Lenny, Teddy’s enigmatic brother. “He’s a pimp and a bit of a chip off the old block in terms of his father,” he says. “He’s a working-class boy with aspirations above his station and on the surface he appears to be a charming and amiable man but there’s a deep-seated resentment and menace about him.

“He’s a character that I always wanted to play so it felt like a no-brainer. It’s the danger and menace that’s innate in him which attracted me to the role because it’s not something I’m generally allowed to play on television or in films.

“Lenny is a character that I always wanted to play so it felt like a no-brainer,” says Mathew Horne

“A character with real danger and menace is something I can’t recall having done, so that’s every reason to play him.”

In a nutshell, Lenny is an enigma in a typical Pinter puzzle. “This play is particularly a puzzle because it’s a game: a struggle for power involving both a familial power play and a gender power play,” says Mathew. “Most puzzles have answers but Pinter wanted ambiguity, and that’s why people are puzzled, because you laugh when morally and ethically you feel you shouldn’t.

“Pinter is holding up a mirror to society but he does that in a very visceral way because he makes you question your own moral ethics. That’s why The Homecoming is deeply complex and deeply challenging, at times hysterically funny, but at other times sickeningly vile. That’s what theatre should do: ask you questions and challenge you.”

How do actors respond to facing a play with a puzzle at its heart? “Working out that puzzle, as actors we have to make choices and decide answers ourselves, but how we play it is to Pinter’s intentions,” says Mathew.

“There are ambiguities, and so it’s up to the audience to each decide what they think, but it’s not that we don’t have to make choices, but ambiguity is innate to the play.

“I’ve made all sorts of choices about Lenny, his background and his intentions, but how the audience reads that is none of my business. Sometimes there’s pure laughter, sometimes uncomfortable laughter, and you might even hear someone in the audience go ‘OK…’, which is really thrilling.”

Keith Allen reckons Jamie Glover’s direction has led to this production being the most humorous of his three encounters with The Homecoming. “I do concur with Keith on that,” says Mathew. “It was important for me in my early discussions with Jamie that we went down the humorous line because I’d seen the 2015 production, which was more bleak and went down the nasty path.

“We feel the only way to redeem some of these characters is to go for the comedy,” says Mathew Horne, centre

“We feel the only way to redeem some of these characters is to go for the comedy. It was written as a comedy, a deep, deep black comedy and it should be funny. Having seen a production that didn’t lean into that comedy, we felt we had to do that – and Keith feels this production is the closest to what Pinter would have wanted.

“You can’t control laughter, but if The Homecoming makes you laugh and then question why, it’s really exciting.”

“Puzzle” is not the only “P” word associated with Pinter. So too is the importance of “the Pause”. “The pauses mean as much as the words, and that’s how we approached it in rehearsals, really working on the silences, the pauses and the ellipses,” says Mathew.

“These are the three areas where actors are supposed to be quiet, but because it’s Pinter, they all mean something different to each of the other characters. So we worked on that; what they meant to each character, and there was only one where we couldn’t think why it was there, or what the character [saying that speech] or the other characters were thinking, but we’ve still made it work!”

How highly does Mathew rate The Homecoming among Pinter’s works? “It is his best play, simple as that,” he contends. “It’s poetic and it’s like a piece of classical music. It’s an immaculate work in terms of the writing and there’s no fat on the meat in this play. It’s deft.”

As for the play’s resonance in 2021, Mathew says: “The exploration of masculinity, male toxicity and the patriarchy is very much bubbling away throughout and that feels particularly relevant now with war happening in Europe and with the ultimate despotic patriarch at the helm.”

Presented by Theatre Royal Bath Productions, The Homecoming runs at York Theatre Royal, May 16 to 21, 7.30pm; plus 2pm Thursday matinee; 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

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