Harold Pinter’s two-act play, The Homecoming (1964), will undoubtedly leave you feeling unsettled, if not downright confused when you walk out of Centerstage.
This dark comedy, directed by Irene Lewis, depicts the return of eldest son Teddy to his childhood home and dysfunctional family in North London after having escaped to America for many years.
Arriving in the middle of the night with his wife, Ruth (Felicity Jones) and Teddy (Steven Epp) attempt to surprise his family with their return, suitcases in hand.
His prodigal return doesn’t proceed quite like he imagined; Teddy finds himself entangled in a bizarre power struggle with his boorish curmudgeon of a father (Jarlath Conroy), his delinquent brother Lenny (Trent Dawson) and his brawn-but-no-brains brother Joey (Sebastian Naskaris) for his seductively attractive wife.
Fraught with subtle derision, blatant abuses and palpable sexual tension — Pinter does not hold back on his insults — The Homecoming is a trial for both actor and audience.
The tension among the all-male household is clear from the beginning. The play opens with Lenny and his father, Max, in the living room, reminiscing about and simultaneously condemning his deceased wife. Max waves his cane in the air — which is both his crutch and his weapon — while Lenny lies on the couch and spouts out line after line of sarcasm at Max, as if he were a patient on a therapist’s recliner.
The shabbiness of the room, with worn furniture and cracked framing, added to the irony of the play’s name: the academic returns to a broken institution and unintentionally thrusts his wife into the middle of a den of wolves.
The web of tension shifts when Ruth encounters Lenny, and things begin to get weird. The two gauge the other’s intentions and potential for danger.
Lenny unabashedly tries to provoke his sister-in-law with stories of his crimes and sexual conquests, and Ruth resists his advances in a more subtle manner, as she gradually changes from female victim to imposing mother figure and seductress.
The scene is quite powerful, as Dawson and Jones build up the tension with affected, wary movements towards and away from each other, until Jones delivers the punch line: “If you take the glass, I’ll take you.” It’s enough to make you shiver.
One of Pinter’s signature moves is the prolonged silence — one could say, awkward silence — that pervades the scenes of The Homecoming. There is no shortage of pauses and breaks in the characters’ dialogue.
There were some powerful moments in which the silence effectively emphasized the emotional tension of the scene and also allowed the audience time to register the depth of the family’s disconnection, resentment and disappointment.
For the greater part, though, the pauses were just too much, in duration and in execution, making the play seem to drag on longer than necessary.
With the exception of Sam (Laurence O’Dwyer) and Teddy as the two characters who arouse sympathy in the audience, the rest of the family appears to be savage and uncontrollable forces that act according to their individual desires.
Of course, putting them all together called for comedic moments, in which Max’s explicit violence bordered on slapstick comedy and Lenny’s menacing threats came off as a lot of huffing and puffing.
Whether it was the ambiguous nature of the play itself or the performance, the line between humor and disbelief dissolved by the end of the first act. By the end of the play, the audience was uncertain of how to react, or whether to react at all.
Overall, nothing is easily placed in this Pinter play. While the obscurity of the characters’ motivations can distance the audience rather than draw them in, it does provide a peculiar and detailed look at the emotional complexities within this dysfunctional family. The Homecoming wraps up this weekend, Feb. 20 at Centerstage
