Jamie Lloyd’s production of Pinter’s The Homecoming is a pile of terrific and silly ideas. Mostly terrific. The action takes place on a raised, thrusting stage surrounded by a steel canopy of scarlet rods like a boxing-ring. Ideal for a play about damaged men competing for a female trophy. Soutra Gilmour’s design is a model of sparse elegance. Centre stage, a worn green armchair like a waning tyrant’s throne. Stage right, a veneered sideboard that signals mass-produced chic. We’re in the 1960s so these pieces are from the previous decade. Well spotted, Ms Gilmour. Each scene is punctuated by racy music and strobe-y lights to remind us that this is a heightened, paranormal world. A perfect approach. If you run the play straight, as a seedy bit of Cockney soap, the non-sequiturs become too conspicuous. These are: Teddy and Ruth. What’s their motivation? Teddy has no reason to leave his three sons in America and bring his weird wife home to a family of insane misfits. Why surrender her without a fight? And why does she not prevent him?
Gary Kemp has worked hard to assume the mantle of the milk-toast philosopher Teddy. Kemp is a multimillionaire pop icon so he’s changed his accent and his body language and effaced his starry swagger to become a neurotic laundry basket, a mimsy, fretting, fatalistic eunuch. Virtuoso stuff. Ruth is fabulous too. Ruth, of course, is not a character but a primal goddess, a principle of nature, a slut-matriarch. Making her a readable human entity is a pointless exercise. Beautiful Gemma Chan plays her coolly, and correctly, as a polygonal sculpture swivelling methodically through her planes, steely, erotic, indomitable, promiscuous, menacing, never intelligible. Elderly Sam is usually portrayed as an impotent blur but Keith Allen, with lovely understatement, turns him into a closet queen (John Inman on a low heat), hinting at his sexuality beneath a prickly veneer of butch dignity.
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