Home is where the hurt is

For a play that is 50 years old, Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is as shocking and troubling today as it was when it premiered in London’s West End in 1965.

As important as what it says (about family, relationships, dependence and co-dependence) is what it doesn’t say—outright, anyway—about sex, power and abuse. It dramatizes the human condition in a way that should make audiences uncomfortable. Are people really this effed up (yes!) and how do they get that way?

Janis Stevens directs the Capital Stage production of this play that helped define “Pinteresque” as an adjective in the theater-world lexicon. Pinter’s play is enigmatic, misogynistic and filled with menace, but it’s also a comedy—a really dark one, but still a comedy. Stevens conveys the play’s humor while maintaining the sense of unease that permeates the play’s subtext.

In particular, she draws upon the pauses and silences in the speech of Ruth (Melinda Parrett, more incredibly cool than usual), the only female in the cast: “My lips move. Why don’t you restrict … your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant … than the words which come through them. You must bear that … possibility … in mind.”

The action takes place in one 24-hour period in an old house in North London where retired butcher Max (Julian Lopez-Morillas, in a portrayal at once decrepit and incendiary) lives with his grown sons Lenny (Ryan Snyder, calculatingly cold throughout), Joey (Brian Harrower, solid in a role that has now become a cliché: the somewhat slow and pitiable boxer) and his brother, a chauffeur named Sam (played by Joe Higgins, with the civility of character that is missing in the rest of the family).

The play revolves around the sudden return of enigmatic son Teddy (Christopher Vettel) and his wife, Ruth, from America. Teddy quickly learns that you can go home again, but you’ll certainly pay a price for it.