The Homecoming, Young Vic Theatre ★★★★★

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is one of the greatest plays of the 20th century. It contains some of the playwright’s best and most harrowing lines, and its portrayal of toxic masculinity inside a working-class north London household remains as depressingly chilling today as we can assume it was when first performed in 1965. Reviving it this winter at the Young Vic, director Matthew Dunster (2:22 – A Ghost Story, The Pillowman) has inflated the script's subtle intimations, making the story’s darkness and violence both in-your-face and highly stylised.

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Retired butcher Max (a barking, sinister Jared Harris) is the bullying patriarch of his resentful all-male household, whose deterioration is tinged with vulnerability through Dunster’s lens. Under his roof are his adult sons: wheeler-dealer pimp Lenny (Joe Cole, loud-mouthed and unlikeable) and boxer-in-training Joey (David Angland, all hunched shoulders and leers), plus his down-trodden chauffeur brother Sam (Nicolas Tennant). Into this festering man cave, where all women other than the family’s dead matriarch Jessie (and even sometimes she) are regarded with disdain, arrives runaway academic son Teddy (Robert Emms, more hopeless than patronising) and his wife Ruth (Lisa Diveney, with impish, unnerving charm).


Lisa Diveney and Robert Emms in The Homecoming at Young Vic. Photo: Manuel Harlan

It’s a bitter, gnarly set-up no woman would knowingly want to enter, but in true Pinter form, it’s at this point the story is untethered from its moorings in naturalism and all obvious plot courses are wildly, grotesquely subverted.

Aiding the surreal undertones in Dunster’s production is Sally Ferguson’s lighting design, which casts intense spotlights on an otherwise darkened stage when, for example, Max’s abusive fathering is referenced. It’s not subtle, or indeed necessary, but it gives already disturbing moments thrilling momentum. Soundtracking these mic-drop reveals is George Dennis’s sound design – all chaotic jazz and crashing cymbals.

Moi Tran’s period design roots the piece in its 60s foundations and is a visual continuation of the story’s unsettling themes. The pastel-pink living room jars with the black-suited, misogyny-spewing men who occupy it. Ruth’s appearance in a transparent chiffon nightdress then glittering ball gown is inappropriate – but certainly not as shocking as what happens next.


Nicolas Tennant, Jared Harris, Robert Emms, David Angland in The Homecoming at Young Vic. Photo: Manuel Harlan

In fact, Dunster’s production dials up the improbability of it all: the men in this household are running – quite literally when circling the stage under Charlotte Bloom’s frenzied choreography – on repressed carnal energy, making it especially tricky to understand Ruth’s decisions. And yet, her robotic, dispassionate addresses to Teddy betray her dissatisfaction. Today, we might say they speak in different love languages (and advise they go to therapy).

It’s a tense watch made all the more so by Dunster’s stomach-clenching, drawn-out pauses. Judging by the press night gasps at big reveals, it's likely this production is an introduction to the play for many, and a reminder that its portrayal of a dysfunctional family where rotten attitudes and behaviours have been passed down through generations is completely and rivetingly timeless.