Power games in Stratford

There’s something decidedly odd in being part of a largely grey-haired audience sitting respectfully through a play about the discomforts of a cantankerous old butcher’s ménage consisting of a chauffeur, pimp, demolition worker and, ah yes, a professor of philosophy incomprehensibly returning from his American campus to the bosom of his dysfunctional family. This revival of The Homecoming is also Harold Pinter’s return to the RSC after a long absence and it’s part of the company’s celebration of its 50th birthday.

In 1965, the premiere of The Homecoming was a landmark of Peter Hall’s early years as founder-director of the RSC. The play was then as iconoclastic as Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger. Much of the detail in what was then excitingly brave and dangerous now comes across as curiously quaint and nostalgic. The cigarettes and cigars, the radiogram, the Humber Super Snipe and the dearth of alcohol were once actual but are now softened into history.