"Pete Postlethwaite in The Homecoming," announces the programme, and it is clear that Greg Hersov's revival of Pinter's 1965 play is intended partly as a theatrical homecoming for one of our most celebrated actors. But while the play still makes its shock-impact, and Postlethwaite is enormously watchable, he is up against recent memories of Ian Holm in the Dublin Gate Theatre production.
Holm's Max was a Hackney Lear crumbling into impotent fury: Postlethwaite's is an outwardly jaunty, bird-like figure haunted by the loss of his wife, Jessie. In her absence he has become a strange, ambisextrous mix of mother and father to his grown-up sons; yet, because Jessie sexually betrayed him, he leaps to the conclusion that all women are basically whores. Postlethwaite offers a well thought-through interpretation of a man who resents women yet desperately craves a female presence. He basks serenely in the attention of his new-found daughter-in-law, Ruth, and even buys flowers to celebrate her decision to settle. My only complaint is that, in making Max pitiable, Postlethwaite sacrifices some of his vestigial authority.
But this is consistent with Hersov's reading, which sees the play less as a power-battle, in which the old king is supplanted by the new queen, than as a psychological study in male-female relationships. Far from being an endorsement of chauvinism, Pinter's play becomes a withering assault on the absurdity of arbitrary male classification of women. Paul Hilton's excellent, shock-haired Lenny sounds a complete prat when he tells Ruth that a dockside doxy was diseased because "I decided she was." And Hersov makes it brilliantly clear that the family's notion of putting Ruth on the game is simply an escalating male fantasy.
There are things I miss in this revival. One, by the very nature of theatre in the round, is a sense of the house itself as a gaunt, intimidating presence. If anything Laurie Dennett's living room looks a shade too desirable. But there are sterling performances from Simone Lahbib as a sensual Ruth, from Michael Higgs as Teddy and from Eamon Boland as the neutered Sam, the odd man out in a household seething with sexual frustration. I've seen more power-driven Homecomings but it's a mark of the play's classic status that it can yield so many rich interpretations.
· Until March 2. Box office: 0161-833 9833.
