For all the difference in idiom, you can see echoes of Ibsen in the ferocious power-and-sex play of The Homecoming. It even contains the same drink-as-sex metaphor. Harold Pinter’s 1965 drama appears weirder, more frightening and more realistic with every year that passes. The crucial word seems to me to be meat. It is no accident that the bullying father of an all-male family is a retired butcher. He and his three sons treat the one woman who arrives as a piece of flesh. Soutra Gilmour’s design underlines the point, enclosing the men’s frowsy sitting room in a red steel frame like rigid scarlet veins. Director Jamie Lloyd stresses it, making a play that is a great simmerer keep coming to the boil. Each crisis is spelled out, with floods of red light, bursts of music, characters frozen or quivering in their bad moments.
You could argue that Pinter himself overdoes the plotting in the last act. Having said so in a review years ago, I was concerned to see the playwright prowling near me at a party. Evisceration seemed likely. Far from it. “I’ve decided to cut the last act,” he said. He might have been fierce, but he was also funny.
Despite Lloyd’s over-emphasis, the wit is evident, in Ron Cook’s weaselly, foul-mouthed Dad and, particularly, in John Simm’s flint-eyed pimp. He savours the words “in the pink” till they sound like an antique curse. Crucially, the greatest ever theatrical stocking moment is not thrown away. Gemma Chan is more mannequin-like than some Ruths: she talks like Eliza Doolittle being tested on her vowel sounds. Yet she can make you believe that you hear the whisper of nylons under her miniskirt when she slowly, deliberately crosses her legs. She hovers there for a second, as if she is about to offer the theatrical equivalent of Basic Instinct.
