Theatre Review (1)

The class I am taking during the second term is a theatre review course. So we see a play every week and write a review on it. I figure I will post the reviews in case you are interested. Here is the one I wrote for Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming:

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming could be diagnosed with multi-personality disorder. It is not just Max’s – the father – effortless switches between fierce tirades and gentle hospitality within the course of one breath. It is the entire tone of Michael Attenborough’s production at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. What sets up as a mundane, been-done-before plot descends into the absurd with one explicit sensual encounter in the second act.

Max, his two sons, Lenny and Joey, and his brother Sam certainly do not comprise the ideal family in their north-London abode, but neither do they initially come across as unrealistic. The incessant and often crude bickering, likely exacerbated by Jessie’s – the unseen mother and wife – death, reveal the possibility of past child abuse as well as the possibility of Sam’s covert homosexuality. Lenny seems to make his money immorally and Joey remains fairly quiet, only demonstrating signs of life when stretching for his boxing practice. But when estranged and scholarly son Teddy brings his wife, Ruth, of seven years home to meet his family for the first time, the dysfunctional unit of real men rapidly transform into a savage tribe of unimaginable beasts.

The realistic personality of the play seems to comment on the trap many of us put ourselves in when leaving home to create a second family. Pinter’s repetition of the term “father” (especially at emotional-scene-ending moments) seems to emphasize this. While Max comes off as being falsely proud of his three boys, he gives his own father Godly reverence. Teddy, contrarily, seems content being the master of his new home and eager to leave his old one.

As the play assumes a new absurd identity, however, themes change. Ruth becomes the central attraction. In the emasculated home, femininity proves most formidable. Willing to relinquish physical control, Ruth gains the most potent possible power over the men. Ruth embodies woman’s dilemma.

Jenny Jules, whose skin color adds new racial levels to this classic, delivers Ruth in a robotic form – allowing Attenborough to express the mindlessness many men assign to women. While Nigel Lindsay’s Lenny, Danny Dyer’s Joey and Neil Dudgeon’s Teddy are acceptable, although slightly hurried and stiff, Kenneth Cranham’s Max is intense but natural. It would not be surprising to discover that Cranham’s cane was a prop swiped from his own home.

Like observing a person with multi-personality disorder, watching Attenborough’s production of The Homecoming disrupts the viewer’s comfort and leaves nervous laughter as the only viable response. The strange thing about being nervous, however, is that it has a way of trapping the experience in your brain. And just as ending a conversation with a mentally disturbed individual pulls at your curiosity into the inner-workings of their mind, The Homecoming will not permit your brain to stop wrestling with what was going on inside Pinter’s skull. Anything that induces that much thought is worth the price of admission.

The pictures in this post are of the Fulham v. Everton football match I saw yesterday. Fulham won 1-0 in a big upset.

Comments Welcome,

Andrew