Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is playing at the Athenaeum until 3 October, and it is about as Pinteresque as Pinter gets. If you know his work, you know the terrain: the power plays, the disillusionment, and dialogue that always feels like it is missing something,. You find yourself hunting for meaning inside the words because what is being said rarely lines up with what is actually happening. This production, directed and designed by Greg Carroll, plays with Pinter in a way that feels fresh. Lines are blurred and you are never sure whether you are watching someone’s internal world, something unfolding in the room, or a subtext that is treated as the truth.
If you want a night of theatre that leaves you thinking and feeling, rather than absorbing and walking away, this is the one for you.
The cast is thoughtfully assembled. The household is three sons, their father, and their uncle, all packed into the same house, and the production draws out every fault line running between them. You watch the rivalries between the brothers, the manoeuvring between fathers and sons, and the strange sideways tension between each member of the house, and it never lands any where safe. Richard Piper’s Max presides over the chaos, with David Field as his brother Sam, and Ben Geurens, Eddie Orton and Peter Houghton as the three sons circling one another for position.
Then there is the woman we never see. The dead mother is spoken about so constantly that you build a whole picture of her, an idealised feminine presence hovering over the house. When Teddy comes home from America and brings his wife, Kate Kendall’s Ruth, you meet another idealised feminine figure, except she arrives as the inverse of the mother, an idealised whore rather than a Madonna. The Madonna and whore split runs right through the piece.
Ruth is the one and only female character on stage, and by the end of the play she has become the figure around whom the entire family’s plans for the future turn. Watching that progression of power unfold is one of the real pleasures of the production, because it opens up a genuinely interesting look at what gets counted as feminine power. It felt dated and contemporary at the same time, which says as much about the tangled worlds we live in now as it does about the play. Kendall gives Ruth a mysterious presence and a commanding hold over every room she enters, and she is perfect for the role.
The set is all dark, heavy, Victorian Gothic furniture, and it does a lot of the storytelling. It feels oppressive and confined, which is exactly right for a group of people this trapped with one another. The lighting stays mostly flat until a handful of pointed moments break the action open and make you question whether what you just saw was real at all.
It is a heavy play and it gives you a great deal to think about, which is precisely the point.
To book tickets to The Homecoming, please visit https://tickets.shakespeareaustralia.com.au/sales/performances/studio/the-homecoming.
