The Homecoming

 Bath Theatre Royal

I am not quite sure if I get Pinter. Which isn't at all the same as saying that I don't like him.

There was a Q and A session with some of the cast after tonight's performance, and a bright young lad of about ten asked "What was the purpose of the show?" 

Keith Allen gave a very spirited reply about the nature of art: that it didn't necessarily have a single meaning or a single point; but that it was there to make the audience feel; and that if the cast felt a sense of tension or discomfort from the audience, then the play was working.

Which is a good answer: but I didn't think it answered the question.

I never feel puzzled by Samuel Beckett. Four-fifths of Beckett is naturalistic conversation. Even the cryptic, metaphorical set-piece seem crystal clear. The meaning of Godot is "this is what life is like". And it clearly is.

Pinter, not so much.

We have an old man, his brother, and two grown up sons. The old man, Max (Keith Allen) swings from extreme politeness to Alf Garnett vitriol. One son , Lenny (Matthew Horne)-- very probably autistic, whether Pinter intended him that way or not -- talks in very elaborate, over formal language; the other, Joey (Geoffrey Lumb), quieter and inarticulate, but rather sweet, works in demolitions in the day and trains to be a boxer at night. Max explains that if he could master defence and attack, he would be a very good boxer. Conversations cycle around inconsequential subjects: Lenny wonders which horse to bet on, Max pontificates at length about the days he lived an "outdoor life" at the race course. Suddenly and unannounced, a third son, Teddy (Sam Alexander), arrives, with his wife, Ruth (Shanaya Rafaat) who the others have never met. The scene shift is so abrupt, signalled with a drum beat and a series of tableaux that I thought perhaps we were shifting to flash back. Teddy is a professor of philosophy in the U.S, has lost his cockney accent, but engages in the same kind of elliptical conversation with his wife that his brothers do with each other. Long discussions about whether Ruth should go out for a short walk and if she has finished her glass of water.

Act One ends with a confrontation in which Max assumes that Ruth is a prostitute; flipping suddenly to offering Teddy daddy cuddles as if he was a little boy. But after the interval they are all sitting around as an apparently happy family, with Max making speeches about how wonderful his late wife was and how happy he is that Teddy has found someone; before flipping back into angry sweary hostility. Lenny tries to engage Teddy in a conversation about philosophy, but he won't play; Teddy opines that he is on a higher intellectual plane than his family; Max talks embarrassingly about giving his sons baths when they were children. The conversation takes a bizarre twist: Lenny is revealed to be a pimp, and they talk openly about employing Ruth as a prostitute. Ruth sleeps in Lenny's bed, but doesn't go all the way. Joey and Ruth openly have sex on the sofa. Max's brother Sam (Ian Bartholomew) collapses with a heart attack, upsetting Teddy, because it means he will have to make his own way to the airport. Teddy goes back to America, leaving his wife with his brothers.

It's very compelling. The reviewers all singled out the set, a drab 50s suburban house with stairs and wall paper extended up to infinity, suggesting (some people said) a nightmare or fairy tale quality about the play. The dialogue is fascinating; everyone is playing status games and cross purposes and it never drags. I suppose I was waiting for the play to come to some sort of point, which it seems not to: are we to suppose that Max is some kind of child molester, or merely that he talks inappropriately? Brother Sam suddenly reveals that a much admired person called Mac had sex with Max's revered wife on the back seat of his car; bit this does not feel like a revelation, so much as a bizarre right turn.

Theatre Buddy thinks the play is about externalising unconscious thoughts: that a man might perfectly well have sexually inappropriate thoughts about his brother's new wife; but that Pinter has created a world in which those thoughts are immediately spoken and acted. Pinter is often thought of as being about inarticulacy; about pauses and silences and gaps; but you could certainly make a case that this piece is about over-communicating. The idea that a woman is no sooner added to the multi-generational boys home than they are talking about employing her as a prostitute (and asking her if she can cook) is arguably making explicit the attitude that men of that generation had to women. (The Daily Telegraph think the production is making it a comment on incel culture, which is surely trying a bit too hard.) Shanaya Rafaat think that Ruth is partly playing the men and retaining the upper hand; she refused to shake on the agreement. (The production's poster strongly implies that she has dethroned Max has head of the household.) The cast certainly thought of the characters as characters: wondering if Lenny has gone away and read his brother's books soe he can argue with him about the contradictions inherent in Christian theism; and if Teddy's treatment of Ruth amounts to gaslighting.

I had more sense of the play as a formal edifice; in which dialogue exists for it's own sake: of Pinter making characters say bizarrely incongruous things in strange contexts, taking us from semi-realism into semi-surrealism. There is certainly something farcical about the way we go from Joey and Ruth embracing on the sofa to Max and Sam suddenly dropping dead on the carpet; as if Pinter was drinking from the same well as Ionesco, or, I suppose Monty Python.

The more Grown Up plays I watch, the more I understand that your Arthur Miller's and Tennessee Williams's are more interested in engineering verbally fascinating confrontations between different types of actorly characters than in telling stories -- which is why Beckett can take the narrative superstructure away and still produce fine drama.

I would like to see the production again, or a different production of the same text. I found it fascinating and compelling but like the young man in the front row, I don't feel I have understood it's purpose.

Buy me a half pint of Guinness next time I go to the theatre