Superfluities Redux

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Set design by Eugene Lee. Costume design by Jess Goldstein. Lighting design by Kenneth Posner. Sound design by John Gromada. With Ian McShane (Max), Raúl Esparza (Lenny), Eve Best (Ruth), Michael McKean (Sam), James Frain (Teddy) and Gareth Saxe (Joey). Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission. Reviewed at the 18 December 2007 performance. At the Cort Theatre, 138 West 48th Street, New York. Ticket and schedule information at Telecharge.

A small family gathering: Ian McShane, Raúl Esparza,
Eve Best and Gareth Saxe in The Homecoming, directed by Daniel Sullivan
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

As Rob Kendt pointed out the other day, Harold Pinter's The Homecoming is based on a true story -- specifically, the story of one of Pinter's friends, Morris (Moishe) Wernick, who, having married then quickly moved to Canada, kept the knowledge of his marriage from his family for ten years. He then returned to London and suddenly introduced her to them in what Wernick called "one of the memorable moments in my life" -- no doubt an understatement. Pinter allowed Wernick to read the first draft of the play, Michael Billington reports in his biography of the playwright: Pinter "freely [acknowledged] that he had expanded on the idea."

Indeed. And I note this only to acknowledge Daniel Sullivan's decision to stage the realism in Pinter's surreal family fantasy of power and seduction, a realism that re-energises The Homecoming. In sacrificing some of the heaviness of the expected Pinterian pauses and silences (Sullivan's production moves at the speed of an express train), Sullivan leads his cast through a production that, while emphasising the comedy of the play, also grounds it fully in the bodies of the cast -- no metaphors here, nor should there be. (See our friends at Obscene Jester for a slightly different, dissenting view.)

It's hard to create a metaphor for an ever-changing family dynamic anyway, and it's in playing the destabilised dynamic instead of the given situation that Pinter's vision is ever new, even in this forty-year-old play. It's still the seedy side of residential London of 1965 in costume, hairstyle and set design here, but the cast Sullivan has gathered plays Pinter with a slightly jumped-up speed more fully of our own time.

Raúl Esparza's Lenny is more vividly instinctual here, more physical, than Ian Holm's colder performance in the 1973 film -- an adder that lunges and snaps instead of a coiled boa. Though Eve Best as Ruth doesn't come into her own until the second act, she does so brilliantly there in a performance that returns a feminine sexuality into this male bastion with a firm confidence fully in keeping with the menacing and fearful dynamic.

Ian McShane as Max in The Homecoming
(Photo: Sara Krulwich for The New York Times)

But perhaps the most surprising return in Sullivan's investment in the naturalistic approach is his persuasive insight that there's still family sentiment beneath the perversions that traditional male/female roles have imposed upon the nuclear structure. There's far more of a brotherhood between Ian McShane's butcher Max and Michael McKean's chauffeur Sam than I've seen in other productions; they locate a playfulness in the violent bantering of the first scene that nears the edge of affection. And the diminutive forms of the sons' names (Lenny, Joey, Teddy) emerge with considerable power here as emblems of the essentially childish, immature sexualities in which these men have their sexual play.

The Homecoming is an incisive, comic, terrifying critique of the crippling effects of the perverse sexuality of a perverse culture; each character is simultaneously tormentor and tormented, victimiser and victim. Sullivan's realistic production of the work only underscores the extent to which Pinter's vision is grounded not in the symbolic realm but in common experience -- rendered lyrically by Pinter's poetic imagination, but ever more real for that. This is as excellent and insightful a staging of The Homecoming as New York is likely to see before the play is a half-century old. Make it a Christmas present to yourself.

There's one final notice to come, of the Broadway The Homecoming, that I hope to post today or tomorrow. But I reach the end of the week (and the beginning of the holidays) thoroughly sated and in need of a holiday myself. It's been not only Pinter, but Marlowe, Brecht and Beckett too in the last two weeks, and that's enough for anyone.

That said, the next week will ease up, but for those who remain in the city, Edward the Second and Beckett Shorts run through the holiday week and beyond, while Man is Man concludes its performance run tonight and tomorrow. At PS122, 500 Clown Christmas, a combination concert, clown show and holiday party, runs 21-30 December. Just a little further downtown C'est Duckie, from the British-based performance troupe Duckie, brings a little vaudeville and burlesque swank to the CSV Cultural Center at 107 Suffolk Street; if you can't catch them before the New Year, they'll be around until 19 January.

And then, of course, we rest. And we'd better. January and February bring us new productions of plays by Antonin Artaud (via John Jahnke) and Peter Handke (via The Flea), a new piece from The Flying Machine based on Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, and Clubbed Thumb's contemplation on the life of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Amazons and Their Men, by Jordan Harrison. More on these in the New Year, but just to warn you -- it'll start with a series of very unique bangs.

So, after the notice of The Homecoming, Superfluities Redux will take a well-deserved chance to recharge its batteries and reopen for business on 3 January 2008. Best wishes for a happy New Year.