Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
✭✭✭✭✭
by Harold Pinter, directed by Jennifer Tarver
Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
August 11-October 30, 2011
“Ruthless”
The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s first-ever production of a play by Harold Pinter proves to be a superb evening of theatre. Under the direction of Jennifer Tarver The Homecoming, Pinter’s 1965 pitch black comic masterpiece, dazzles with its wicked humour and jaw-dropping audacity.
The play is set in the large grimy front room of a house in a working class neighbourhood of north London, wonderfully imagined in all its dingy brownish grey decrepitude by designer Leslie Frankish. A wall separating the front room from the stairs was removed when Jesse, the matriarch of the family, died, and serves as a constant reminder of her absence. Max, a retired butcher, is the patriarch of this womanless home. He does the cooking and his brother Sam, a private chauffeur, does the washing up. Living with them are Max’s two sons by Jesse, Lenny, who is likely involved in illegal activities including pimping, and Joey, a would-be boxer and the dimmest of the lot.
Pinter’s plays always involve struggles for power, territory or possession. Tension is already high at the very start when Lenny completely ignores his father’s presence and refuses to respond to his questions. Father and son are locked in a struggle for dominance in the household and Max is losing though he rambles on about his past prowess. When the mild-mannered Sam enters, Max takes his frustration with Lenny out on Sam. We see that the family harbours the illusion that once Joey has finished his training and is in the ring his earnings will lift the family out of the moribund condition it’s been in since Jesse’s death.
Into this charged atmosphere step Teddy, Max’s eldest son, away in America for nine years as a university professor, and his wife Ruth, whom the family has never met. When they finally do meet Ruth they assume she’s a tart Teddy’s brought home and as part of their resentment of his success they continually deny that she is actually his wife and mother of his three sons. Though Teddy is clueless how to react, Ruth shows that she is no stranger to game-playing. What ensues is a struggle as hilarious as it is disturbing between Ruth and the Teddy’s family and between Ruth and Teddy as to exactly how much a part of the family she will be.
The performances are excellent across the board. Brian Dennehy and Aaron Krohn give the lie to the commonly held notion that Americans cannot play Pinter. Dennehy creates a magisterial portrait of a Max, who like King Lear rages against others because he knows he has no power, who constantly asserts his authority because he knows he has none. He is so inured to speaking for effect rather the truth, he frequently contradicts himself--praising his wife in one breath, calling her a whore in the next.
Krohn’s Lenny is his main opponent and he gives a great performance seething with menace and frightening in its unpredictability. In true Pinteresque form he can make the mere repetition of others words or the simplest of questions reek with aggression. The creates an unsettling contrast between Lenny’s love of abstruse vocabulary and refined expression with a steely delivery that undermines any sense of gentility. He can, in the most unemotional terms, describe beating up an older woman, not unlike his own mother, because he decided she had the pox.
Stephen Ouimette, in a beautifully understated performance, is every bit their equal as Sam, the one representative of morality in the play. His meekness and politeness mask the inner outrage he feels at the goings-on in the family. He suffers an onslaught of insults from Max, seemingly because he knows they are unjust and can understand what motivates his brother’s anger. The calm of his reaction contrasts with the volatility of Lenny’s.
As the enigmatic Ruth, Cara Ricketts masterfully holds own against the men. The play has often been viewed as misogynist because of its casual discussion of rape and because of the men’s equation of women with whores. Yet, Tarver makes clear from Ruth’s first provocative remark that she has a sexual power the men don’t know how to deal with. When she coolly tells, Lenny, who wants to take away her water glass, “If you take the glass … I’ll take you”, the prospect opens up to Lenny and to us that Ruth is not the subservient 1960s wife we first took her for. Since Rickett’s Ruth never loses her poise and eerie serenity, we come to realize that she has her own hidden agenda and may be using the men of the family as much as they think they are using her.
If Lenny is the malevolent brains of the family, Joey and Teddy are its two dullards, though for opposite reasons. Ian Lake in a finely judge comic performance shows that Joey--demolition man by day, would-be boxer by night--may be physically fit but is otherwise quite a few bricks short of a Lego set. Teddy, in contrast, as so well played by Mike Shara, is too stymied by his intellect to take action. He’s trained to watch and analysis but not intervene so stands pathetically by while his brothers, father and wife make a fool of him.
Tarver masterfully keeps the atmosphere perfectly balanced between humour and menace. As is necessary in a Pinter play, she has made sure that the actors are absolutely clear about their characters’ motives even if they are not clear to us. In fact, part of our involvement in a fine production like this is in trying to work out what is really going on beneath the jumble of the characters’ posturing, half-truths and lies, where the subtext of what is said is greater and more complex that any words uttered.
Stratford hasn’t staged a contemporary play by a British author on the Avon stage since Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in 2004 and Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane in 1992. This production of The Homecoming deserves the greatest possible success. Let’s hope that it encourages the Festival in future to explore more of the classic plays of the past half century.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Brian Dennehy as Max. ©2011 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2011-08-12
The Homecoming