THEATRE REVIEW:
THE HOMECOMING
13 AUG/11

JOHN COULBOURN,
QMI Agency
R: 4.5/5

STRATFORD - Be it ever so humble, chances are you’ll be grateful as hell for whatever it is you’ve been calling home once you’ve seen The Homecoming.

Written by the late, great Harold Pinter in the mid-1960s, at the peak of his genius, The Homecoming was a theatrical groundbreaker in its day — a new basic-in-black comedy that brought its audience to the edge of its seat and left it skin-crawling discomfited and breathless, amused, abused, shocked, dismayed and perhaps even a little titillated at finding themselves suddenly part of someone else’s nightmare. And happily, it has lost little of its power in the ensuing half-century, as witnessed by a flawed but powerfully compelling production that opened in the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre Thursday under the direction of Jennifer Tarver.

Tarver, you might recall, rose to prominence here at the Festival with her masterful direction of Krapp’s Last Tape, starring Brian Dennehy, who happily returns to the Stratford stage and Tarver’s vision for The Homecoming.

He’s cast as Max, the patriarch of the family at the heart of Pinter’s bleak vision. A retired butcher like his father before him and a widower, Max shares his sprawling and decaying London home with two of his three grown sons — the enigmatic Lenny, played by Aaron Krohn, who runs a stable of women-for-rent; and the affable but dim Joey (Ian Lake), the apparent recipient of a few too many blows to the head in pursuit of a career in pugilism. Max’s brother Sam, played by Stephen Ouimette, also shares the house, earning his living as a chauffeur and doing his best to disappear from the world in which he finds himself a perpetual, even professional, outsider.

Max’s third son, Teddy, played by Mike Shara, has escaped familial bondage, moving to America where he teaches at a university — but suddenly, he pays an unannounced return visit to the family seat, accompanied by a wife no one knew he had. Apparently married on the cusp of his departure to America, he and his wife have built a new life there and a family that, like Max’s, now includes three sons.

But clearly all is not well with Teddy’s marriage and once he brings wife Ruth, played by Cara Ricketts, into his father’s home, his marriage starts to come unglued — helped at every turn it seems, by his father and his two brothers. Indeed, even Ruth herself seems content to throw her marriage away, once she’s entered the great moldering world of Leslie Frankish’s set — recreating Pinter’s very specific instructions. It is a tragic story, but in Pinter’s hands it is also compelling and often bleakly funny and Tarver mines that humour for all it is worth without ever shortchanging the tragedy.

In the process, she draws particularly fine performances from Dennehy and Ouimette. The former rules his roost like a malevolent toad, using his personality like the walking stick he carries, as a cudgel, while the latter paints a touchingly funny portrait of tragically ingrown and ineffectual decency. Ricketts meanwhile offers up a Ruth as impenetrable and as enigmatic as a sphinx, while Lake manages to combine the charm of a child with a deeper physical menace, rendered more powerful for all its innocence.

Just a tiny bit of that innocence would go a long way in leavening Krohn’s tightly coiled performance, which at times threatens to over-balance the work, as does Shara’s uncharacteristically heavy-handed application of comedic gormlessness, which turns Teddy into a total twit.

In the end, Tarver and her company create a work that is nothing if not memorably Pinteresque — a world open to every interpretation, where nothing is as it seems, even while it all seems terribly familiar.