David Farr's revival of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the RSC's Swan theatre in Stratford has the same spine-chilling precision as his 50th anniversary production of The Birthday Party three years ago. It's a fabulous piece of theatre -- dark with suppressed violence without losing any of the comedy. Designer Jon Bausor's set is a symphony of bloodstains, with a dark red carpet and armchair, red lampshades and a line of sinister red-stained garments hanging up at the back of the stage. The images evoke the past career as a master butcher of Max, the foul-mouthed patriarch of this dysfunctional all-male family. There's a beautiful balance between realism and non-realism in Farr's direction of they play, which avoids fancy innovations but lets every line of dialogue count. Despite the absence with a broken arm of Jonathan Slinger as Lenny, the performance I saw seemed faultlessly cast. Nicholas Woodeson (Goldberg in the 2008 Birthday Party) endows Max with a frightening mixture of rage and false bonhomie. His sadistic treatment of his unmarried brother Sam (Des McAleer) is painful to watch, as it should be. Richard Riddell, switching from the role of Joey to that of Lenny, is a sinister and unpleasant presence in a part that suits him far better than Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. Aislin McGuckin gives a powerful performance as the enigmatic daughter-in-law Ruth, whose decision to stay with the family and abandon her husband and children for a new career as a sexual plaything is the central mystery of the play. What she captures so well is the poise and movement of the Jean Shrimpton era, when a slight shift in the way a woman in a knee-length skirt positioned her knees could convey volumes of information about sexual desire. For the first time in seeing this play I found myself watching Teddy, played by Justin Salinger (Stanley in The Birthday Party), the brother whom Ruth abandons. Teddy says almost nothing as his wife turns her back on him and begins her liaisons with his brothers, but Salinger gives him an expression which is a silent cry of pain. Not a line of Pinter's classic play has dated in the last half century. He's often been imitated, but no other writer has come close to generating the level of tension and mystery locked in the subtext of his best writing.
My trip to the Swan also included The City Madam by Philip Massinger, directed by Dominic Hill. Perhaps there are just too many Dominics in British theatre? We have Dominic Dromgoole, Dominic Cooke, Dominic West, Dominic Cooper. Do we need Dominic Hill as well? On the basis of this production, I don't think so. I'm not going to give it a full review because I left at the interval, finding it very disappointing and unfunny. One can argue whether Massinger's satire on wealth and social climbing in Jacobean England is really a comedy at all, but Hill's approach is to play it for laughs. Unfortunately he turns the actors into cardboard cyphers and two-dimensional puppets, instead of starting from the assumption that every character is a real human being. The result is reminiscent of a Blackadder sketch, or one of Ernie Wise's famous historical costume dramas in the Morecambe and Wise show.
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