homecomingreview

For a bit of fun, we first of all have a small sequence of Ian McShane and Raúl Esparza from the show "Theater TALK" which airs on PBS in New York:

Harold Pinter’s
The Homecoming
Tuesday 7:00pm
Wednesday 2:00pm & 8:00pm
Thursday 8:00pm
Friday 8:00pm
Saturday 2:00pm & 8:00pm
Sunday 3:00pm
Show Closes April 13, 2008
Cort Theater

Reviewed by Wendy R. Williams
Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is a splendid entry into the world of Broadway “talkers,” joining two other excellent plays that also opened this year, The Seafarer and August: Osage County (see my March 2008 Theater Column). There are no gimmicks in these plays; each relies on the playwright’s gift for language to mesmerize the audience. And The Homecoming, like the other two recently opened plays, is set in that familiar factory for evil, the nuclear family.

The opening scene of The Homecoming is set at night. First we see Max (Ian McShane) and his son Lenny (Raul Esparza) verbally sparring, sitting in the living room (Eugene Lee’s excellent set) and fighting about nothing. Then Max’s brother and co-owner of the house Sam (Michael McKean) arrives home from his chauffeuring job and Max starts picking on Sam. In the course of all this bickering, we find out that the house is inhabited by two brothers (Max and Sam) and two of Max’s sons, the acerbic Lenny and the slow-witted boxer Joey (Gareth Saxe). We now know where we are; the stage is set for the action.

Everyone goes to bed and then the play really begins. A third son, Teddy, a philosophy professor who immigrated to America (James Frain) arrives with his beautiful wife Ruth (Eve Best). It is the middle of the night when they arrives, everyone else is asleep. Teddy and Ruth begin to gently spar. Teddy is unerringly cheerful; one would think he had arrived at a warm and loving home. But whatever Teddy suggests, Ruth wants no part of it and Teddy eventually wanders upstairs to see to sleeping arrangements, leaving his wife behind.

Lenny wanders downstairs to find Ruth. He is surprised to see her because he has no idea that Teddy has arrived or for that matter than Teddy is married. Lenny and Ruth then play their first game. Lenny attempts to dominate Ruth and Ruth quietly stands her ground.

Soon it is morning and all the other players arrive and the battle begins. And it is a battle. Max verbally attacks Ruth and she seemingly swats him away like an annoying fly. All the men of the household act like a pack of wolves, moving in for the kill. And Ruth does not even seem to notice; she has some innate power that allows her to conquer while she is both dominated and plays the dominatrix. Ruth’s langorous sexuality stops-the-clock when she merely crosses her legs.

There are silences in The Homecoming. But these are the kind of silences you would see in a lair filled with coiled snakes. And no one is innocent. Not even the one-who-got-away, Teddy. The men in the household play a homoerotic-gang-bang game of get-the-new-sister-in-law, alla Edward Albee’s hump-the-hostess in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The director, Daniel Sullivan, has done a beautiful job of reinterpreting Pinter’s work. It is just as shocking and disturbing now (per my read of the old reviews) as it apparently was forty years ago.

And how do the actors do? Very well indeed. Ian Mcshane leaves his well-known Deadwood-powerful-but-wicked performance style to portray Max, a nasty old man whose powers are waning. Raul Espparza is mesmerizing as Lenny. Michael McKean plays the ineffective Uncle Sam with grace and Gareth Saxe turns on a dime as the dim-witted Joey. And as I said before, Eve Best is utterly spellbinding as Ruth. And James Frain as Teddy gives one of the most haunting performances of the night. When we first meet him, he seems like the “normal” outsider, the character through whom we, the audience, will enter the play. But before the end of the evening, we find that he has been dipped in the same evil vat of poison as the rest of his family.

The Homecoming is playing at the Cort Theater (138 West 48th Street) through April 13, 2008. Tickets 212-239-6200 & 800-432-7250 & telecharge.com. For more information, log onto: thehomecomingonbroadway.com

Two Homecomings ~ reviews by the same author on both recent productions of the play in New York and in London. The first:

Daniel Sullivan's Broadway revival to mark this play's 40th anniversary shows London what it is missing. Eve Best in the part of Ruth gives a beautifully nuanced performance that may well enable her to repeat the three New York awards that she won playing opposite Kevin Spacey in Moon for the Misbegotten. She deserves to turn the Tony nomination for that performance into the real thing this time as well.

The cast on this occasion is half English, with Miss Best as Ruth joined by popular screen personality Ian McShane and The Tudors' James Frain for the visiting team.

The best support for the lady in a strong ensemble comes from Raúl Esparza, and that is saying something. He has to fight an accent that veers between American, Cockney, RP and even Australian and overcomes it. He looks the part of Lenny, Ruth's seedy brother in law, and balances menace and lewd comedy extremely well.

He it is that first comes upon the interloping woman, of whom the family is unaware, when her husband brings her home for a first visit. Frain's golden boy, Teddy, is a philosophy professor in the United States and has the perfect life - intellectual challenge, sun, a beautiful wife and three children. However, by the time that the family has finished with him, he is a defeated if still amiable man.

They are a funny lot, perhaps made so by the lack of a mother figure. McShane's Max rules ineffectually with a walking stick rather than a rod of iron. Michael McKean is Sam, his brother, a man who is supposed to bolster Max's ego. He manfully does so before delivering a startling revelation, as he expires on the dirty floor of a suitably shabby and cut-down, post-war living room set, designed by Eugene Lee.

The two older men are mirrored by brash Lenny and his other brother, would-be boxer and experienced loser, the backward Joey (Gareth Axe).

The journey of each of these limited people is remarkable. The men will sacrifice anything for female company, both spiritual and sexual, while Ruth is willing to be prostituted to gain control of her own and their lives. This is gripping stuff, especially after the interval of a two hour production. Having developed the set-up in true Pinter style, the playwright then allows a strange logic to drive the action to an unexpected conclusion.

It will be interesting to see whether Broadway is willing to embrace a play that is so far from where it now normally seeks its kicks. Not only is this not a musical, it is not even a light comedy or easily digested.

One can only hope that a new audience is drawn to the theatre and that they demand more top class acting in demanding dramas. London gets its own version at the Almeida next month but, sadly, without Miss Best.

Harold Pinter is proving very popular on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment. Michael Attenborough's production of The Homecoming has opened only a week after The Lover and The Collection at the Comedy and follows hard on the heels of a Broadway version starring Eve Best and Ian McShane.

It is inevitable that one wishes to compare these two interpretations, appearing almost simultaneously to mark the play's 40th anniversary. Overall Attenborough is the winner, deriving more comedy and more menace, largely thanks to the performances of Kenneth Cranham as Max, the patriarch of a non-nuclear and distinctly unorthodox family, and Nigel Lindsay as his spivvy son, Lenny.

Where Daniel Sullivan's version at the Cort shone was in an immaculate performance from British actress Eve Best playing Ruth, which is not necessarily to belittle Jenny Jules but to honour one of the best two or three stage actresses currently performing.

The Almeida's boys of thunder - the family to come home to?

Strangely, Jonathon Fensom's set does not have quite the shabbiness that one expects of the residence of such a seedy family. The carpet looks brand new and all of the furniture might well have been in the warehouse only a few weeks before. A few cigarette burns and coffee spillages would work wonders.

This is the living room of a house occupied by four tough East Enders, each of them colourful in his own way. Max, who makes anger into an art form, on this occasion, carries a fearsome weapon that looks like a shillelagh, rather than an ordinary stick.

He uses it to threaten, albeit impotently, the other members of the household. His brother Sam is a chauffeur, portrayed with great dignity by Anthony O'Donnell. He was clearly in love with Max's deceased wife Jessie and keeps the peace to preserve her memory from uncomfortable revelations.

Lenny, smooth on the surface but both tough and sleazy beneath, is the breadwinner, thanks to a collection of flats in Soho - and their occupants. His younger brother, Danny Dyer's Joey, is being trained to become a champion boxer but clearly has neither the talent nor the brain, even for that occupation.

Despite their differences, these men apparently get on together well until the return of the brainy son, Neil Dudgeon playing Teddy. He is a doctor of philosophy who lives in the States with beautiful Ruth, whom none of the others have met despite the fact that the couple have been married for nine years and have three children. Initially, the play features a meeting of brain and brawn, in which neither comes out on top, although cool Ruth does tantalise the men by her very existence.

Jenny Jules and Neil Dungeon - London's Ruth and Teddy

The petty problems of individuals begin to boil over but are soon forgotten, as Ruth becomes the focal point for the second half of the two-hour long play. The lady having dismissively accepted the unashamedly sexual approach of Lenny and outrageous accusations of sexual looseness from her newly found father-in-law, her husband not unreasonably prepares for their early departure.

There is then a fascinating power struggle that, depending upon your point of view, either leaves Ruth prostituted by these low lifes or lording it over them. Michael Attenborough has done a fine job in bringing out the comedy in this piece, helped by some excellent acting, especially from Lindsay and Cranham, whose portrayal of Max's apoplectic explosions appears to put his health at risk, so red-faced does he become at regular intervals.

The casting of a black actress, Jenny Jules in the central part should not either add to or detract from the quality of the production, although the behaviour of the central characters would have been very different had Teddy really brought home a wife of Caribbean origin. She does a good job in looking cool and detached, although, at times, might be regarded as too much so.

Overall, this ensemble works well together in a worthy revival that is yet another reminder of what a good, original playwright Harold Pinter has been for the last four decades.

Published: Friday, March 28, 2008
Pinter’s ‘Homecoming’ worth the mum & gown

Begin scene: soft mood lighting, late at night. His silk robe opens dramatically, as he pours her a tall glass of … water. Absurd sex has never been quite so disturbing — and riveting.

With the Broadway revival of his mid-’60s masterpiece “The Homecoming,” playwright Harold Pinter brings sensuality back to a cleaned-up Times Square. In contrast to the bland bright lights of corporate billboards, the world of the decaying family oscillates between hilarity and disturbing rawness. One of the best on Broadway in a season flooded with plays, this production suggests that a finely tuned ensemble may be the best way to transform Pinter’s obscure diction into a captivating family dissection.

The center of the tribe in question is father Max (Ian McShane), anchored in an ancient armchair. His brother Sam (Michael McKean) lives in the same house, works as a chauffeur and plays the part of the domestic — the two old bachelors couldn’t be more opposite. The next generation is composed of three sons; Lenny (Raul Esparza) and Joey (Gareth Saxe) have stayed with their father in North London. At the beginning of the first act, the third son and his wife arrive in the house in the middle of the night: the homecoming.

Eve Best and James Frain in The Homecoming

Teddy (James Frain) has been living in America and currently teaches philosophy at some prestigious university. He has three sons with his wife Ruth (Eve Best), and they’re all at the end of a European vacation. Teddy and Ruth were married in London six years ago, apparently without his father’s knowledge, and now he’s come home without warning.

Watching Pinter is something like assembling a puzzle. There’s no easy exposition or character development. Little about the plot — if there is one — develops as expected, and the various surreal twists often leave productions of his plays impotent and frustrated. Thankfully, the naturalistic approach of this staging handily avoids this trap.

The scenes in “The Homecoming” appear simple at first. Set in a large living room, skillfully designed by Eugene Lee, they are mundane on the surface, but small details — Esparza pouring water, McShane carefully sputtering and raging — make every moment compelling. The performers are so charismatic, and the plot so opaque, that it’s difficult to blink for fear of missing some illuminating detail.

Esparza’s performance is reason enough to see this production. Executed with impeccable comic timing, his Lenny is perfectly self-possessed and sleazy. McShane is equally compelling, and perhaps even creepier, as he wields his power as patriarch. Best’s portrayal of Ruth appears out of place at first — she acts as though plagued by a horrible migraine when she first enters and remains oddly stylized throughout the play. Even though her hollow delivery can be a little off-putting, it somehow manages to work: Her stylized motions appear natural, not forced.

Director Daniel Sullivan has kept the ensemble well-oiled and suitably choreographed, creating the sensation of a family slowly spinning out of control. Joshua Brody ’07, assistant director for this production, explained that Sullivan deliberately went against popular dramaturgical theories to keep the characters grounded in a reality that resembles ours. It certainly worked for this production, and it would be interesting to see if a similar treatment would do the same for Pinter’s other, more obscure works.

The combination of disturbing misogyny — Ruth is constantly referred to as “tart” or “slut” — and numb affect makes “The Homecoming” feel surprisingly relevant. The emotional distance forced on the characters and the audience, by proxy, feels eerily like the vicarious pleasure afforded by the instant gratification of the Internet and blogosphere. Contemporary technology can remove emotion from everyday communication and make it seem painless; the blatant quality of “The Homecoming” cuts away at this artificial distance and asks how numb we can afford to be.

There is no easy moral lesson to be had by the end of the brief two-act play: Pinter not only refuses to provide answers, but also recognizable questions. This opaque approach to portraying life creates a particular — and profound — kind of theatrical realism. All that a story really needs is a glass of water, a silk robe and a woman’s bare calves.

Pinter's tale of family scandal and seduction comes to the stage

With revivals of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," "Gypsy" and a fantastic new play called "August: Osage County," this Broadway season deserves very much to be subtitled "The Year of Family Dysfunction." That means that Daniel Sullivan's dazzling revival of Harold Pinter's dark comedy (perhaps the darkest comedy ever written) "The Homecoming," fits right in.

It starts off as a work that anyone with a large, somewhat disconnected family can relate to. Max (Ian McShane) is in an obvious power struggle with his son, Lenny (Raul Esparza), the middle child and his brother, Sam (Michael McKean), a popular chauffeur. Max is the head of the household and feels he remain as such. Nobody agrees. The one person Max has somewhat of a hold over is his boxer son, Joey (Gareth Saxe).

Coming off of his highly acclaimed role in 'Deadwood,' Ian McShane plays the role of patriarch in 'The Homecoming.' The play by Harold Pinter highlights family dysfunction in North London and is currently playing at the Cort Theatre.

Hopefully, your family is unable to relate to the games of sexual conquest which ensue as Teddy (James Frain), the long-absent son who's retreated to America to teach philosophy, and his minx of a wife, Ruth (Eve Best), return to the North London home in the middle of the night.

Max, upon meeting Ruth, berates Teddy for bringing a "dirty tart" into his home, not realizing that she's his wife. But, as we learn in the second act, Max isn't too far off. Ruth uses her sexual prowess to take control of the household, acting as the sexual-being and mother-figure they've been longing for since matriarch Jessie died years earlier.

Daniel Sullivan's erotic production plays up the comic aspect of the text while maintaining Pinter's trademarked rhythm and symbols (where silence is as much of a character as any human on stage.) The highlight of the production is Kenneth Posner's lighting, which creates a shadowy, institutional world in which the characters live.

The actors are very good, too. McShane, known to audiences today from his role on "Deadwood," in the 40th Anniversary of his Broadway debut, is a gripping performer who, like every other cast member, draws the audience in from the first line of dialogue. Best is completely mesmerizing as the sexually charged Ruth, and, by merely crossing and uncrossing her legs (showed off well in Jeff Goldstein's costumes), knocks the wind right out of viewers.

Esparza, a musical theater stalwart, introduced his "restrained" persona in last season's revival of "Company" and continues to tinker with it, turning his monotone, one-note performance of Sondheim's character "Bobby" into the menacing, sly, overwhelmingly funny Lenny. McKean, a comic actor seen in all of the Christopher Guest movies, captures the subtleties of Sam, in what otherwise is an underwhelming role.

Frain, of "The Tudors" fame, is as demure as it comes in his Broadway debut as Teddy, the "Doctor of Philosophy." Saxe is utterly incomprehensible as Joey and it comes off as an interesting character choice: the boxer who's been clocked in the head too many times. It's very much a product of the '60s and the creakiness is as evident in the text as it is in the staircase at the center of Eugene Lee's drab, minimalist set.

However, the themes don't land with too much of a thud. Combining characters who are vying for sexual control over one another with the recent, rapid downfall of Eliot Spitzer over a prostitution scandal, audience members realize how Pinter's 40-year-old play rings shockingly true.

You Can Go Home Again, but You'll Pay the Consequences

By BEN BRANTLEY
First of all, it really is that good. You would expect it to have shrunk over the years, the way buildings that loomed large in your childhood seem smaller when you revisit them. But as the first-rate revival that opened Sunday night at the Cort Theater makes electrifyingly clear, The Homecoming is every bit as big as its reputation.

Forty years after its Broadway debut titillated and outraged American theatergoers, this Harold Pinter masterpiece of family warfare continues to unsettle. It's not the play's sexual content or the blood-drawing viciousness of the clan it portrays. After all, since The Homecoming first opened, kinfolk in kitchen-sink dramas, including the current hit August: Osage County, have regularly provided far more explicitly detailed catalogs of their hatreds and perversions.

But like most great art The Homecoming operates on a mythic as well as an immediate level. It insists that some shadowy part of you is part of it. It burrows under you skin and festers.

Mr. Pinter, you see, knows where you live. The Homecoming conveys this knowledge by stealth and, more often than not, by stillness. And the fine cast assembled for Daniel Sullivan's new production including Eve Best and Raúl Esparza in benchmark performances grasps the power of holding back in making a fathoms-deep impression.

The timing for this Homecoming, the first play by Mr. Pinter on Broadway since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, is ideal, and not just because it's the 40th anniversary of its New York premiere. It's December, remember? The month when children of all ages return to the family hearth and often get burned.

You may initially think you have little in common with the North London household headed by the scabrous Max (Ian McShane). But you soon start to sense a disquieting familiarity in the patterns of domestic friction.

Come on, don't tell me that when you go home, or when relatives visit you, there aren't clashes over who does the dishes, who ate the last snack, who goes to bed first, who sits in the most comfortable chair, whose memories of your shared past are the truth. These small battles of one-upmanship are the fabric of existence for Max; his brother, Sam (Michael McKean); and Max's two grown sons who still live with him, Lenny (Mr. Esparza) and Joey (Gareth Saxe).

The stakes rise, as they will when a long-absent relative returns, when Teddy (James Frain), a professor of philosophy living in the States, shows up in the middle of the night with his wife, Ruth (Ms. Best). Who's top dog now? The claim to that title is ultimately fought in ways I hope will never be visited upon your family.

That doesn't mean that the play's uncomfortable universality goes away. Mr. Pinter's particular brilliance is in sliding imperceptibly from the ordinary surface to the primal darkness of what lies beneath.

The nigh-perfect form of The Homecoming, as the critic Penelope Gilliatt wrote when it opened in London in 1965, is in the swaying of violent people as they gain minute advantages. That dynamic, which propels most of Mr. Pinter's plays, is seldom successfully realized in American productions. (Recent Broadway revivals of Pinter plays I love, like Betrayal and The Caretaker, left me cold.)

That's partly because English class accents are important in landing the cadences (and establishing the balance of power) in Mr. Pinter's famously pause-pocked dialogue. It is also no easy matter for any actor to find the character-defining noise in Mr. Pinter's silences. Playing Pinter requires repressing the urge to act actively. Mr. Sullivan's cast keeps the lid on itself so impressively that when eruptions occur, you feel you've been sucker-punched.

Such restraint is especially remarkable in Mr. Esparza, who made his reputation as one of the showiest actors in town (The Normal Heart, Taboo). For this year's revival of the musical Company he learned to stand still, with gratifying results. That didn't prepare me for the intricate layers he brings to the entrepreneurial Lenny.

With only minor adjustments of facial expression and vocal inflection, Mr. Esparza conveys a multitude of impulses, simmering in coexistence. In a breath he suggests a petulant adolescent, an icy killer, a take-charge businessman and an infant who only wants Mommy. His is the most visibly needy Lenny I've encountered. But this extra transparency never cancels out the enigma at the core of all Pinter characters.

The same can be said of Ms. Best, a much-lauded London stage actress who made her Broadway debut this year opposite Kevin Spacey in A Moon for the Misbegotten. This fine-boned actress did wonders then in expanding to fill a part that calls for a giantess. Here she's an absolute knockout.

Ruth is the most fraught of the roles, a sphinxlike woman who has been defined by critics as both a feminist and a misogynistic creation. But like Mr. Esparza, Ms. Best lends her character the sense of a complete emotional history that I'd never grasped before. In the company of men Ruth is as guarded and calculated as they come, calmly registering disapproval and amused contempt with the merest lowering of her eyelids.

But there are a couple of moments, when she thinks no one is watching, when this Ruth reveals the weary, wistful face beneath the sang-froid. You sense she wishes that the rules of the game she must play were different. As it is, she still trumps the competition.

Mr. McKean, who became famous as a comic television and film actor, gives a beautifully calibrated, heartbreaking performance as the proper, dutiful Sam. And the relatively unknown Mr. Saxe and Mr. Frain are superb as the dopey, brawny Joey and the disdainful, uxorious [uxorious adj. Excessively submissive or devoted to one's wife. [From Latin uxorius , from uxor , wife.] Teddy. Like their fellow cast members they give archetypal characters revelatory and particularizing shading.

Mr. McShane (known as the ace expletive-spitter of television's Deadwood) is also excellent, with one caveat. He seems too robust for a decaying man who knows his virility is waning. He is dazzling, though, in switching between scorching venom and synthetic sentimentality.

Pretty much every detail is in correct place in this production, including Eugene Lee's cozy minefield of a living room and Jess Goldstein's class-situating costumes. It's clear we're in the middle of the 1960s, but the view is not through a telescope.

People who were originally put off by The Homecoming may now find it too close to home. It's a bit like Picasso's shockingly severe painting of Gertrude Stein from 1906, the one he predicted in time would resemble its subject. We may not have thought we saw ourselves in The Homecoming four decades ago. Now it feels like a mirror.

THE HOMECOMING
By Harold Pinter; directed by Daniel Sullivan; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Kenneth Posner; sound by John Gromada; production stage manager, Roy Harris; fight director, Rick Sordelet; general manager, Albert Poland; technical supervision, Hudson Theatrical Associates. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara and Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser and Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, in association with Joseph Piacentile. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through April 13. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

WITH: Ian McShane (Max), Raúl Esparza (Lenny), Eve Best (Ruth), Michael McKean (Sam), James Frain (Teddy) and Gareth Saxe (Joey).

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TheatreHop: The Homecoming

James Frain and Eve Best, curtain call opening night at The Homecoming

Michael Snyder, Bwog's resident off-campus theatre critic, serves up his thoughts on the Broadway rendition of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming.

Now that Harold Pinter has been awarded the Nobel prize, his plays have officially entered the canon, and yet a play like The Homecoming, now in a wonderful revival at the Cort Theatre on 48th Street, in many ways feels far more modern than most new plays you're likely to see on Broadway.

The story of The Homecoming is simple: the curtain opens on an ordinarily unpleasant day in the blue-collar, north London home of Max, his two sons Lenny and Joey, and his brother Sam. The drama really begins when Max's oldest son Teddy returns for a surprise visit from America where has been a philosophy professor for nine years. He brings with him his wife Ruth, about whom he has told his family nothing.

Needless to say, Pinter did not become famous as a master storyteller. Eschewing exposition, Pinter allows us only the most vital details of his characters lives, presented intermittently throughout the play's spare two hours. Thanks to Pinter's brilliant and meticulous craftsmanship, it is in piecing things together after the play ends that you realize just how much information he has given you and in so few words.

Even in such an outstanding cast, two performances stand out: James Frain as Teddy and Eve Best as Ruth. Frain, in his Broadway debut, is the picture of English restraint and academic arrogance. Without raising his voice, Frain delivers the play's most hurtful speech, and even then he remains a study in elegant removal, a chilling example of a man who has had all humanity educated out of him. As Ruth, Best gives a perfectly austere performance. Whenever she glides on stage Best commands absolute attention with her unsettling combination of studied primness and searing carnality.

The surprise in this production, though, is neither the quality of the performance nor of the play itself; these are well-known actors in one of the most celebrated plays of the last fifty years. The surprise here is in The Homecoming's continued ability to shock even jaded theatergoers. Although the play's explicit sexuality may not elicit gasps from the audience anymore, by the play's end I found myself breathless at this all-too-civilized depiction of humanity in a state of such refined decay.

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Well, you know, Pinter is sort of like the Shakespeare of our generation; he's our Beckett. He has found a way of creating stage language and a stage dynamic that is epic in scale and which is life, but larger than life. Where the characters resinate with the same kind of mythic intensity - God, this is a good pitch (laugh) - with a kind of mythic intensity as Shakespeare or as any of the great writers of the past; Where you feel that they have taken the language of everyday speech and turned it into a new kind of music.

In this case it's very funny, but it's incredible dark music because of what Pinter's looking at which is the very worst and cruelest dynamics in families. So, it's about this family but it's really about all families.

Also from BROADWAY BEAT, from a January 7 airing of December 16, 2007 footage from the opening night after party:

James Frain: Well, there are a lot of basic gags in this. But the audience laughs at different places at different times because there's a combination of uneasiness and tension, of intrigue and stress, which sort of breaks into comedy all the time. But every time there's a laugh, Pinter just kind of closes it down. So, it's a really interesting dynamic. People have a really good time, so..."

Richard Ridge: Talk about the challenge of doing Pinter.
JF: (after a pause) I read somewhere someone said it's kind of like tightrope walking...ehh, it is sort of tense, you have to get this balance between the tension and the menace, and the humour. But, it's just like doing any other play to be honest with you, mate.

From on Broadway World.com's video coverage of the Opening Night after party, December 16, 2007:

You know, Dan Sullivan said it's a great Christmas show, it depends on what kind of family reunion you're used to. You've heard of Love/Hate relationships? This is more of a kind of Hate/Hate relationship. Um, but the interesting thing about the dynamic is that they can't let each other go. The tension between that and the fury that they have is what creates the comedy.

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Pinter's 'The Homecoming' as a modern-day version of the Book of Ruth
By Irene Backalenick

Theatre critic Irene Backalenick covers theatre for national and regional publications. She has a Ph.D.in theatre criticism from City University Graduate Center. Her book "East Side Story--Ten Years with the Jewish Repertory Theatre" (based on her doctoral thesis) won a first-place national book award in history. Other awards in journalism and theatre criticism include a New York Times Publishers Award (received while writing for The New York Times). Her professional organizations include the American Theatre Critics Association, Association for Jewish Theatre, Outer Critics Circle (on the executive board), Drama Desk, Actors Equity Derwent Committee, and the Connecticut Critics Circle e-mail: ireneback@sbcglobal.net Web : www.nytheaterscene.com

There’s a mysterious, ambiguous quality to the works of the eminent Jewish-British playwright Harold Pinter. In his hands, the silences, the pregnant pauses, are as meaningful as words. And now, in the current Broadway production of “The Homecoming” under Daniel Sullivan’s sensitive direction, those silences come into their own. Pinter never gives out the answers, but forces the viewer to interpret. “The Homecoming” indeed allows for free-ranging interpretations—this time, in an impeccably-staged production.

One might see “The Homecoming” as a modern-day version of the Book of Ruth. Ruth is brought home to her husband’s people (“Your people will be my people.”) But the noble Biblical tale is set on its end, turned awry—and in fact given a shocking amoral twist. Yet this may be a connection to Pinter’s own roots—a kind of acknowledgment of his Jewish background, a way of tying the past to the present.

The story is that Teddy, a college professor of philosophy, now based in the States, returns to his British family for an unexpected visit. He brings with him, also unexpectedly, his wife Ruth, mother of his three sons. The old homestead is not what might be expected, but actually the scene of a working-class, low-level ménage. The father Max is a loud-mouthed braggart of a butcher, his son Lenny a pimp, his younger son Joey an aspiring, slow-witted boxer, his brother Sam a chauffeur. Into this all-male stronghold wanders the professor and his nubile wife. (The mother Jessie is long gone from the home—and small wonder!)

With the new woman on the scene, it all plays out in a struggle for domination. Sex is not so much an aphrodisiac as a power tool. Who are the losers, who are the winners? Pinter does not spell it out, but leaves it to the viewers to interpret as they will.

If one allows one’s imagination free-range, one might also see “The Homecoming” as a Peter Pan tale. Peter has brought Wendy back to the Lost Boys, to be their mother, to care for them. Again, a dark, scary version of a gentle, lovable tale.

However one interprets this “Homecoming,” Sullivan offers up a superb production, with Eve Best (as Ruth) at its chilling core. With every twist of her legs, with every sip of water, with every pause, she dominates the stage. Surrounding her, like planets around the sun, are Ian McShane (Max), Raul Esparza (Lenny), Michael McKean (Sam), Gareth Saxe (Joey), and James Frain (Teddy)—each creating a striking portrait. The garrulous Max and the shrewd Lenny are particularly strong in their roles.

In all, a first-rate presentation of Pinter’s classic drama “The Homecoming.” But we are left on our own, to make of it what we will.

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Best of British ... Eve Best in a revival of The Homecoming at New York's Cort theatre.

Broadway loves to canonise the British, though it's rare for one British performer to seduce American theatre critics twice in one year. That, however, is precisely the happy fate that has befallen Eve Best, who had never even been to New York prior to making her Broadway debut last spring in the Old Vic production of A Moon for the Misbegotten, for which she was nominated for a Tony award. Usually, performers in that situation pack their bags and return home once the run ends, happy to have the memory of three months of nightly ovations. Janet McTeer, for instance, hasn't played Broadway since her scorching debut there in A Doll's House a decade ago, while Pauline Collins's lone Broadway credit remains Shirley Valentine back in 1989, for which she, like McTeer, won a Tony.

Best has gone one better by lingering on in Manhattan, this time to help originate a homegrown New York revival of a defining London play: Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, which has opened at the Cort theatre some 40 years after its Broadway premiere. This latest production is directed by an American, Daniel Sullivan, and has a cast of six, comprising three Brits and three Americans. (Michael McKean, seen on the West End last season in John Kolvenbach's Love Song, is unexpectedly touching as the play's bachelor uncle, Sam, the chauffeur.) But whereas Best' s Josie Hogan in last spring's O'Neill revival was repeatedly described as a lumbering cow of a woman, the actress this time is playing the sleek and sexily enigmatic Ruth, the lone woman newly arrived at an all-male north London household of sexual predators headed by Ian McShane as the cane-wielding Max. Critics raved, and The New York Times followed on cue with an adoring profile.

Indeed, the way Ruth upends and in some way usurps the household to which her husband Teddy (the excellent James Frain) has brought her is mirrored in the command that Best exerts over a New York audience. Less accustomed to the Nobel laureate's language and rhythms than we are here, the matinee crowd with whom I caught the show were busily responding to some of the more pointed lines and situations in the play with yelps of astonishment and surprise. There were also nervous chuckles at Anglicisms ("bollocks", "git" and the like) that aren't heard every day on a Broadway stage. Watching Best smooth down her scarf is to see the Pinter pause made physically ripe, while her 11th-hour descent down a staircase, hair tumbling around her shoulders, should attract the attention of Hollywood casting directors in a way that the deliberately ungainly, physically awkward Josie never would.

Best aside, other Brits are making their big noise offstage. Of the various events I caught over a glut of New York holiday show-going, none was as entirely satisfying as the director Richard Jones's witty, moving, and shimmeringly designed Metropolitan Opera production of Hansel and Gretel, featuring a cast packed with Brits: Rosalind Plowright, Alice Coote, and a delicious Philip Langridge, playing the witch, amongst them. At the performance I attended, one boorish spectator could be heard demanding that the second-act set be changed, since designer John MacFarlane's representation of the woods was apparently too non-literal and stylised for this person's liking. So be it. Jones has long been rattling cages in the opera and theatre world in this country, and it's high time that New York wakes up to his particular, elegantly perverse brand of wonder.

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When Harold Pinter’s masterpiece The Homecoming first premiered on Broadway some four decades ago, the dramatized hostility was met with equal hostility from the bourgeois audience, as witnessed by the playwright himself:

One of the greatest theatrical nights of my life was the opening of The Homecoming in New York. There was the audience. It was 1967. I'm not sure they've changed very much, but it really was your mink coats and suits. Money. And when the lights went up on The Homecoming, they hated it immediately. 'Jesus Christ, what the hell are we looking at here?' I was there, and the hostility towards the play was palpable. You could see it. The great thing was, the actors went on and felt it and hated the audience back even more. And they gave it everything they'd got. By the end of the evening, the audience was defeated… I thought it was a great night. And that was a real example of a contest between the play and the audience. There's no question that the play won on that occasion, although that is not always the case.

Eve Best, James Frain and Raul Esparza in The Homecoming

Forty years on, Broadway audiences have caught up a bit with the Nobel Laureate; they’re slightly less threatened by narrative ambiguity or a milieu that lands them far from Noel Coward cocktail territory. In the current Broadway revival, the play’s savagery still shocks and surprises, but the black, bristling comedy resonates even more, especially in the hands of this smart, talented ensemble. True, Ian McShane is a bit too sprightly as the warped, withered Max, but Eve Best (Ruth) and Raúl Esparza (Lenny) are both so mesmerizing that they ultimately eclipse McShane’s performance. Another standout is Michael McKean; he imbues the role Max’s chauffer brother Sam with all the absurd, fastidious pride it demands.

If you’re yet unfamiliar with the story, it’d be best not to spoil it, even though the events of the play are few and simple. It’s enough to know that the appallingly dysfunctional action, set in working class North London, centers on a surprise visit home made by Max’s son Teddy (James Frain) and his wife Ruth. The play is a disorienting carousel of domination, desperation and lust, made thrilling by Pinter’s bitter humor and his way of evoking the essence of a relationship while leaving much open to interpretation. It’s not a political play in any direct or allegorical sense, but the Vietnam-era subtext – that brutality begins at home, with paternal warnings like “You’ll drown in your own blood” – is obviously just as palpable today.

Age 77 and done writing plays, Pinter’s public statements are more explicit but just as unsparing and accurate, as evinced by a recent interview:
"The longer I live the more I feel I have an obligation to be very concrete and precise about the way power and hypocrisy are manifested in this world. I do think the American president and our Prime Minister are gangsters."

The Homecoming continues through April 13th at the Cort Theatre [138 West 48th St]. Ticket prices vary. Photo of Eve Best, James Frain and Raúl Esparza by Scott Landis.

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Don't let "The Homecoming" get lost in the post-strike tumble of pulse-racing new family dramas.

Yes, Harold Pinter's slippery demon of a power play is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its shattering Broadway premiere. But the scathing erotic mystery, which opened at the Cort Theatre last night in Daniel Sullivan's exquisitely wry production, feels at least as brash and twice as unsettling as any fresh vivisection of what our pious times call family values.

Eve Best, Ian McShane and James Frain in the 40th anniversary revival of Harold Pinter's 'The Homecoming,' playing at Manhattan's Cort Theatre. (Newsday / Ari Mintz / December 3, 2007)

This is the mother - or, as this tribe's gleefully brutal males would prefer - the father of dysfunctional domestic satires. The masterwork, which established the British playwright in America and swept four major Tony Awards, comes from the creative cauldron that made "Pinteresque" an adjective for things menacing, ambiguous, playful and armed with a lethal arsenal of articulate pauses.

And what a family this still is. A philosophy professor and his wife come back from America to visit his father, brothers and uncle in the shabby, unrelenting maleness of their working-class North London home - designed with hopeless, punched-out care by Eugene Lee. The father welcomes the woman, named Ruth, with this typically admiring observation to his sons: "I've never had a whore under this roof before ... ever since your mother died."

Sullivan, best known as a director of finely shaded naturalism, resists any temptation to soften Pinter's stylized angles or round out secrets with comforting psychological implications. This "Homecoming" is tight and nasty. These characters loathe one another with a primal elegance, toying with the surfaces of civility that coat sickly sentimentalities about dear old mum and dad.

Eve Best, so improbably effective as the lumbering Josie in "Moon for the Misbegotten" last season, puts an unflappably poised spell over the visit as Ruth - one of Pinter's deeply unknowable and resonant females. The simple act of removing a scarf from her head becomes a deliberate sensual conundrum, a master class in unexpressed expressionism.

Ian McShane, famously antiheroic as the saloon owner in HBO's "Deadwood," has more dashing, crumbling good looks than are usually seen in Max, the once-powerful lowlife patriarch. Thus, along with the scary cane and even-more fearsome mouth, the actor with the deep sooty voice makes us believe Max's boasts about his former charisma.

How bracing to see Raúl Esparza, already cherished in musicals, bring his brooding eyes and intelligence to a style that, despite the almost musical demands, doesn't require him to break into song. He has a mesmerizing slickness as Lenny, the damaged but dominant middle son and neighborhood pimp. He is the sort of successful loser who wears a silk dressing gown over his pajamas (emotionally precise costumes by Jess Goldstein) and keeps his cigarettes in a silver case.

Michael McKean - yes, the ironist from "This is Spinal Tap" - flips beautifully into the quiet darkness as Max's less dynamic brother, Sam, a service-class chauffeur who knows more than he acknowledges about acceptable politesse. Gareth Saxe is aptly baffled and baffling as Joey, the punchy would-be boxer and daytime demolitions worker.

And James Frain maintains the distance of superiority as the eldest son, Teddy, who believes he escaped the family tentacles by "maintaining an intellectual equilibrium" in American academia. And perhaps he has.

The male contingent is a multileveled assortment of thwarted ambitions, war metaphors, smelly cigars and shocking insight. Attempting to discuss philosophy with his educated brother, Lenny asks, "How can the unknown merit reverence?"

Of course, the unknown is the core of this uncompromising artist, without whose influential style we cannot imagine Sam Shepard or David Mamet or, as some have speculated, even Monty Python. When Pinter received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005, the academy said he "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."

When "Homecoming" opened on Broadway in 1967, newspapers ran columns of heated speculation on the mind-boggling meanings of his mysteries. We may boggle less these days. But as Lenny says, "In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?" The answer is Pinter.

THE HOMECOMING. By Harold Pinter, directed by Daniel Sullivan. Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., through April 13. Tickets: $26.50-98.50. Call 212-239-6200. Seen at Thursday preview.

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December 29, 2007 -- ACTOR Raúl Esparza had to step out of his role as a wisecracking London pimp during Thursday night's performance of Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming" at the Cort Theatre when a woman in the audience began loudly wheezing near the end of the first act. After the house manager announced an "emergency," Esparza was left alone onstage. He broke the suspense by asking the audience, "Any questions so far?" - alluding to the dark family comedy's many complexities. Then, when it turned out the gasping woman was all right, Esparza chuckled, "Wait, I've lost my accent." As the lights dimmed, he muttered, "Where was I?" The house manager boomed over the public address system, "You were about to light your cigarette." Esparza looked up, as if to Heaven, and asked, "Mother?" - and the show went on.

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New York
"What the hell was that all about?" said the friend who went with me to "The Homecoming" as we left the theater. The last scene of Harold Pinter's best-known play hasn't lost its power to reduce audiences to head-scratching confusion 40 years after it was first seen on Broadway. But even if you're not sure what all of "The Homecoming" is all about, you'll still get the message of the viciously comic revival now playing on Broadway -- and you'll revel in the work of six actors who definitely know what's what.

Gareth Saxe, Raúl Esparza and James Frain play McShane's sons.

As usual with Mr. Pinter, what happens in "The Homecoming" is easier to describe than explain. The scene is a crumbling house in a working-class quarter of London. Its occupants are an all-male family consisting of a razor-tongued ex-butcher (Ian McShane, lately of HBO's "Deadwood"), his mild-mannered brother (Michael McKean), and two of his three sons, one of whom is a pimp (Raúl Esparza) and the other a punch-drunk boxer (Gareth Saxe). Son No. 3 (James Frain), a snooty professor of philosophy, stops by for his first visit in six years, accompanied by his sexy wife (Eve Best). The next day Son No. 3 departs, leaving behind his wife, who has agreed to serve as the family's resident cook-concubine. Curtain.

So... what the hell was that all about? Mr. Pinter declines to answer, save to acknowledge the more or less obvious fact that the men in "The Homecoming" are misogynists of various sorts. But until the arrival of the enigmatic climax, there's nothing elusive or elliptical about this portrait of men without women, in which the brutal intramural sniping of a hopelessly unhappy family is portrayed so precisely that you can't help but laugh at it. Nothing is so funny as plain truth, and Mr. Pinter dishes it up by the ladleful: "Plug it, will you, you stupid sod, I'm trying to read the paper." "Listen! I'll chop your spine off, you talk to me like that! You understand? Talking to your lousy filthy father like that."

Daniel Sullivan is one of New York's most uneven directors, but when he's hot, he's hot, and his staging of "The Homecoming" cuts like a hacksaw. Mr. McShane, Ms. Best (who is a very great actress in the making) and Mr. Esparza have the flashiest parts and make the strongest impressions, though no apologies need be made for their colleagues, or for Eugene Lee's seedy set, which looks as though someone had worked it over with a wrecking ball.

All these things help to underline the enduring excellence of Mr. Pinter's play. Cheery it isn't, but if you're feeling the need of a nice stiff drink of wormwood to cure that holiday hangover, "The Homecoming" is guaranteed to do the trick.

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'The Homecoming' Through April 13, Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St. Tickets: $26.50-$98.50, (212) 239-6200.

Just in time for eggnog and carols, a little family depravity. Well, a lot, actually.

Forty years after its original Tony-winning run, "The Homecoming" by Harold Pinter is no longer so shocking. But its provocative nastiness and pitch-black humor remain intact in the lucid production at the Cort Theatre.

Michael McKean (l.) and Ian McShane in a sibling set-to.

The story unfolds in a North London home (designed in drab detail by Eugene Lee), where widowed ex-butcher Max (Ian McShane) rules the roost and bullies his brother Sam (Michael McKean) and sons Lenny (Raul Esparza) and Joey (Gareth Saxe) with verbal and physical abuse.

The men believe that all women are whores. Cue the entrance of Ruth (Eve Best), who's eager to prove them right, even if she is married to Max's firstborn, Teddy (James Frain), a philosophy professor home for a visit. He moved to America nine years earlier and never mentioned he had a wife or three sons.

There's plenty to chew on about power, sex, morality, misogyny and family, which Pinter, a 2005 Nobel Prize winner, serves up with signature intelligence, mystery and ambiguity.

Daniel Sullivan's astute direction captures the distinct rhythms of Pint-er's dialogue, as the production casts a strange spell that grips you tight. McKean gives Sam poignancy, while Frain's reserve feels right for the intellectual Teddy. The robust Saxe is well cast as the tongue-tied Joey, an amateur boxer who, unlike his dad, never mastered "how to defend and to attack."

Best follows her Broadway debut in "A Moon for the Mis-begotten" with more fine work. In a beat, Ruth's cool detachment turns icy; you sense she is always acutely aware of the physical power she possesses (Jess Goldstein designed the evocative clothes).

Esparza plays Lenny, who turns out to be a pimp, with menace and volatility. As the alpha male, McShane mines Max to the max, unearthing deep veins of cruelty and pockets of kindness.

It's difficult to shake the image of Max, Lenny, Joey and Sam surrounding Ruth. It's just as hard to determine what her station is - queen bee or slave - in the foul family.

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Onward and Upward with the Arts
Demolition Man
Harold Pinter and “The Homecoming.”

Pinter in 1962, two years before “The Homecoming.” Photograph by Cecil Beaton. Broadway Revivals

On a grisly London evening last October, as the Victorian street lamps of Holland Park were flickering in the twilight, I arrived too early for an appointment at Harold Pinter’s handsome town house. Pinter, who is seventy-seven, and who, for the past five years, has battled esophageal cancer and a rare skin disease that has twice brought him near death, had insisted that I come by, even though he’d been ill earlier in the week. "Better strike while the iron is hot," he’d said. I could see him through the high, arched window of his living room, parked in an armchair by the fire, almost sculptural. A walker was strategically positioned behind him. For decades a dynamo—the author of some thirty plays and two dozen screenplays, the director of more than twenty productions, and an influence on such dramatists as Heathcote Williams, Joe Orton, David Hare, and David Mamet -- Pinter was winding down.

Over the years, Pinter’s work has inspired a journal (The Pinter Review), added words to the English language (the Oxford English Dictionary lists "Pinteresque," "Pinterism," "Pinterian," and "Pinterishness" as acceptable terms), won dozens of awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005, and made him an object of perpetual public fascination in Britain. (His recent performance in Samuel Beckett’s "Krapp’s Last Tape," at the Royal Court—he began his career as an actor—sold out its entire run in sixteen minutes.) No other British playwright since Noël Coward has so dominated and defined the theatrical landscape of his time. Even Coward, who hated the New Wave that put him out of fashion, considered Pinter an exception. "Your writing absolutely fascinates me," he wrote to Pinter in 1965 after seeing his third full-length play, “The Homecoming.” “You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in, except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second. I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to explain anything and the arrogant, but triumphant demands you make on the audience’s imagination. I can well see why some clots hate it, but I belong to the opposite camp—if you will forgive the expression.”

I leaned against a wall rereading "The Homecoming," which was what I’d come to discuss with Pinter and which was about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of its début on Broadway with a new production at the Cort Theatre (directed by Daniel Sullivan). The paperback copy of the play that I held in my hands had been purchased during the Broadway début, at the Music Box, under the sensational direction of Peter Hall, in 1967. I’d seen the show on a Tuesday, bought the play at intermission, and returned to the Wednesday matinée to notate the blocking.

"The Homecoming" changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes. In 1967, I didn’t know quite what I’d seen; I knew only that the play’s spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling. Pinter had taken the narration out of theatre: “The Homecoming” offered no explanations, no theory, no truths, no through line, no certainties of any kind. I was drawn to the charisma of the work in the same way that Pinter—I later learned—had been compelled by Shakespeare. "You are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you, in which the mind is subject to an intense diversity of atmospheric," he wrote in "A Note on Shakespeare," in 1950, six years before he started to do a similar thing with his own plays.

I was teaching night school when I first saw "The Homecoming," and I wanted to use the play in my class. I wrote to Pinter in care of the theatre. To my amazement, he replied. We met at Sam’s, near the Music Box, on Forty-fifth Street. I was twenty-six. I had never met a playwright before. I couldn’t have known then how frequently our paths would intersect over the decades: “The Homecoming” was the subject of my first book; for a few years in the early eighties, Pinter’s son, Daniel Brand, from whom he is now estranged, was a tenant in my house; and my friend and downstairs neighbor in London, the director Karel Reisz, was probably the best interpreter of Pinter’s later plays and the director of one of Pinter’s best screen adaptations, "The French Lieutenant’s Woman" (1981). While Reisz and Pinter were working on their screenplay, Pinter’s silver Mercedes convertible was often parked outside our house. Once, just before a work session, my wife and our four-year-old son, Chris, sat at Reisz’s kitchen table with Pinter as he held forth in his commanding manner. When Pinter left the room, Chris turned to us and asked, "Is he a policeman?" "No," his mother said. "He’s a very good writer." "Can he make a ‘W’?" Chris asked. (Pinter alluded to that incident in his introduction to Volume IV of his "Plays"; "One of the most interesting"and indeed acute"critical questions I’ve ever heard," he wrote.)

"The Homecoming" is the last and best play of Pinter’s fecund early period (1957-65). It is a culmination of the poetic ambiguities, the minimalism, and the linguistic tropes of his earlier major plays: "The Birthday Party" (1958), whose first production lasted only a week in London, though the play was seen by eleven million people when it was broadcast on TV in 1960, and "The Caretaker" (1960), an immediate international hit. "The Homecoming" is both a family romance and a turf war. A professor of philosophy, Teddy, returns to London after six years in America to introduce his wife, Ruth, to his father, a butcher named Max, to his uncle Sam, a chauffeur, and to his brothers, Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, an aspiring boxer, all of whom haunt Max’s cavernous living room, a sort of cave for the barbarians within.

By contrast, Pinter’s living room is capacious and elegant, overflowing with books, family photographs, paintings, and flowers. The first time I met Pinter to talk about "The Homecoming," he was dressed in a black leather jacket, a black turtleneck, and black pants; forty years later, he was still in black, except for a raffish pair of pink wool socks that he wore, he explained, for circulation reasons. Pinter has always been as vigilant about his look as about his prose. He is not a dandy; he is an actor in the habit of watching himself go by. The beloved only son of a Jewish East End tailor, he was, even as a young man, what might then have been called "natty." Black, his favored color, set him apart and generated an aura of authority about him; it also worked as a kind of spotlight, focussing the viewer’s eye on the sharp features of his large head. Like his plays, the young Pinter combined an external formality with an internal ferocity.

Even now, recuperating from illness, he had an exactness, a scrupulousness of mental focus, that generated a palpable tension. In his negotiations with the world, Pinter always seems braced. "There is a sense of danger about him all the time," Peter Hall, who has directed seven of Pinter’s plays, including “Betrayal” (1978), the best drama of his middle period, told me. "Although he’s the most good-hearted and generous man, people are frightened of him. He has this stentorian voice and a very rich vocabulary. He also has a kind of physical presence. You can quite see him hitting somebody." When I leaned forward to pour the wine that had been set out for us, Pinter took the bottle away from me. "I can still pour a glass of wine," he said.

"The author’s position is an odd one," Pinter said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. "The characters resist him; they are not easy to live with; they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent, you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind-man’s bluff, hide-and-seek." In “The Homecoming," Pinter’s game of hide-and-seek begins with the play’s ironic title. Whose homecoming is it? At first glance, it seems to be Teddy’s. Or is it Ruth’s? As we discover, she was born nearby. Ruth knows the lay of this desiccated land, with its reservoirs of furious disappointment. Her comfort in this milieu is what makes credible her eventual outrageous decision to leave Teddy and her three children and stay in Max’s female-starved household. In this neglected environment, Ruth, at last, feels needed. In one way or another, she is the object of each man’s hidden desires: the aging Max wants to feel potent; Sam wants company; Joey wants to be nurtured; and Lenny wants a trick to put on the game. Sensual, elegant, and private, Ruth hides her anger behind a façade of self-control—which Pinter makes clear, in a scene in which she encounters Lenny on the night of her arrival. Ruth knows Lenny’s argot; she reads the vulnerability behind his brazen aggression. Later, when Lenny tries to take a glass of water from her hand, Ruth calls his bluff. She holds her glass toward him:

RUTH: Have a sip. Go on. Have a sip from my glass.
He is still.
Sit on my lap. Take a long cool sip.
She pats her lap. Pause.
She stands, moves to him with the glass.
Put your head back and open your mouth.
LENNY: Take that glass away from me.
RUTH: Lie on the floor. Go on. I’ll pour it down your throat.
LENNY: What are you doing, making me some kind of proposal?
She laughs shortly, drains the glass.

"The Homecoming" ’s territorial free-for-all is waged with a rhetorical panache that is almost Jacobean in its richness and its ferocity. Its vulgar verbal impasto created a stage sound that was entirely new. Pinter, according to David Hare, "cleaned the gutters of the English language." "He kicked the whole thing down," David Mamet said. Nowhere in the decorous restraint of postwar British theatre could you hear, for instance, anything approaching the brio of Max’s roaring tirades at his “wet wick” brother: "One lot after the other. One mess after the other. . . . Look what I’m lumbered with. One cast-iron bunch of crap after another. One flow of stinking pus after another." Until Pinter, contemporary British playwrights had purveyed a series of well-made forms of exposition. Terence Rattigan admonished society in neatly resolved problem plays; John Osborne hectored Britain and took its temperature; Noël Coward made charm his solution; Arnold Wesker sent a Socialist message through his characters, and T. S. Eliot a Christian one. "The attitude behind this sort of thing might be summed up in one phrase: ‘I’m telling you,’ " Pinter said in 1962.

Pinter’s plays, on the other hand, offered no exhortations, no admonitions, no solutions, no common ground among people. "I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it’s more like a quicksand," he wrote. "We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?" Pinter’s plays reënact this difficulty of knowing. "Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labelled and ready for export is dead . . . and meaningless," he wrote in a letter to the first director of "The Birthday Party," in which he refused to explain his characters. In another letter, to a British theatre magazine, in 1958, Pinter wrote, "To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to me facile, impertinent, and dishonest. Where this takes place it is not theatre but a crossword puzzle. The audience holds the paper. The play fills in the blanks. Everyone’s happy. There has been no conflict between audience and play, no participation, nothing has been exposed. We walk out as we went in."

At the brilliant finale of "The Homecoming," as Ruth is enthroned in Max’s chair, with the new order established and the men grouped around her, Max falls to the floor and sobs; he crawls toward Ruth, who is stroking Joey’s hair like a lap cat. "I’m not an old man," Max says. "Do you hear me? Kiss me." As the curtain falls, it is clear that the distribution of power among the people onstage is poised to change. But neither the characters nor the audience knows what that rearrangement will be. Earlier in the play, Lenny tells a tall tale about having beaten a woman who was "falling apart with the pox." Ruth punctures his story with a practical question: "How did you know she was diseased?”"“How did I know?" Lenny says. "I decided she was." The truth, in other words, is anybody’s guess. Meaning is what you make it. (Pinter’s refusal to draw conclusions in his plays means that some productions capitulate to the anxiety of the unknown. When the curtain came up on a Bulgarian staging of "The Homecoming," he thought he was in the wrong theatre. "A large man and a small woman were running around the stage, looking into a lighted house," he said. "They kept coming back, these two, in various guises and modes." These additions turned out to be two frequently invoked but always offstage characters--MacGregor, Max’s legendary mate, and Jessie, Max’s faithless wife.)

The territorial battle being waged in “The Homecoming” is ultimately not about the house or the woman but about whose perception of reality will prevail. Teddy, a professional maker of meanings, insists, “I’m the one who can see. That’s why I can write my critical works.” Ruth, however, has a physicality that overrides Teddy’s epistemology. "Look at me," she says. "I . . . move my leg. That’s all it is. But I wear . . . underwear . . . which moves with me . . . it . . . captures your attention. . . . The action is simple. It’s a leg . . . moving. My lips move. Why don’t you restrict . . . your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant . . . than the words which come through them." The thrill of the play is its realization of Pinter’s aesthetic: a precarious balance between ambiguity and actuality. "There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false," Pinter said in his Nobel speech. "A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." This paradoxical approach forces both the actors and the audience to play harder. Both are drawn into a highly charged dramatic metaphor in which, as Pinter said, "everything to do with the play is in the play."

The characters’ parries, challenges, and volte-faces are violently emotional improvisations, whose drama is only underscored and heightened by Pinter’s signature pauses. "The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear," he once wrote. "It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place." "When we were rehearsing ‘The Homecoming,’ " Peter Hall told me, "I remember Paul Rogers saying to me, very early on, ‘What’s all this about the pauses? We decide where the pauses are.’ And I said, ‘No, you don’t. Not anymore. The author has decreed where the pauses are. It’s our job to find out why they’re there.’ "

"One pause is quite unlike another pause," Pinter said suddenly as we were talking, then stopped. "There, I just paused. That didn’t take me very long. A pause can be a breath. What it has to do with is thought: what has just been said and how to respond to what has been said. Pauses are not musical devices. They should be natural." Pinter’s wife, the historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, describes pauses as "the curse of Pinter." Pinter has sometimes cursed them as well. He attended a rehearsal for one all-star production of "The Homecoming" (with Pierre Brasseur, Emmanuelle Riva, and Claude Rich, at the Théâtre de Paris) that he thought ran an hour too long. "They took my word ‘pause’ literally," he said. "It was an extremely tedious enterprise."

"The Homecoming" is a summation of the iconoclasm and the truculence that brought Pinter to the peak of his writing career. When he was a young man, anger defined him. "I’d never met anyone like this before," Dilys Hamlett, an early girlfriend of Pinter’s, told his biographer Michael Billington. "I always have an image of Harold striding down the street in his navy-blue coat with a rage against the world. But it was also a rage for life, a rage to do something, a rage to achieve something." By the time he was twenty, Pinter had renounced Jewish orthodoxy, military service (he was a conscientious objector), and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; by the time he was thirty, he had abdicated the principles of contemporary dramaturgy.

He wrote "The Homecoming" in six weeks in 1964. "It kind of wrote itself," he said. He remembers being surprised by the process and laughing a lot at the toxic, belligerent family that was emerging from him. By then, Pinter had got together enough money to move, with his first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, and their infant son, from a cramped flat in Chiswick to a bow-fronted Regency house in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. The magnificent barrenness of the play’s North London setting was imagined as he sat at his writing desk overlooking gardens, within earshot of the sea.

When Pinter finished the play, he gave it to Joe Brearley, the inspirational teacher who had first introduced him to drama when he was still a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School, in the mid-forties. (Brearley had also cast Pinter as Macbeth in a school production in which he got national attention--"Master Harold Pinter made a more eloquent, more obviously nerve-racked Macbeth than one or two professional grown-ups I have seen in the part of late years," Alan Dent wrote in the News Chronicle.) Brearley had been adopted as an honorary paternal member of Pinter’s close-knit gang of friends, whose competitive camaraderie played a crucial part in his coming-of-age, and he happened to be visiting Pinter in Sussex. "I gave him the play to read," Pinter recalled. "I waited in another room. About two hours later, I heard the front door slam. I thought, Well, here we are. He doesn’t like it. About an hour later, the doorbell rang. I answered it. He said, ‘I had to get some air.’ He said, ‘It is your best.’ "

Pinter, on some level, agrees. "I think it’s the most muscular thing I’ve written," he told me. "I delight and relish in language. I certainly did with ‘The Homecoming’ to an extent that I probably haven’t done in any other play." Pinter, who wrote poetry long before he attempted a play, creates drama like a poem, working entirely out of the unconscious. He starts with an image or a phrase; he teases it out, listening and rearranging until the words suggest a character and the character suggests an action. In an early note for "The Homecoming," he scrawled the word "jealousy." Beside it, like a sort of rhyme scheme, he wrote:

When the characters finally arrive on the page, Pinter knows no more than what they tell him. As he told a group of drama students in 1962, "You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it’s out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said." In this sense, Pinter took the actor’s understanding of subtext and turned it into a metaphysic. This discovery allowed him to distill and reconfigure the inspiration of Samuel Beckett--he was reading Beckett from 1950 on—into his own distinctive rhythmical, alliterative idiom, which made a drama of utterance, not explanation, and where the appearance of reality was an uncompromising dissection of the unknown. Mamet, speaking of Pinter and Beckett, said, "They did what few dramatists have done in modern times: they construed the drama not as the interplay of ideas but as the interplay of sounds. That is, they understood the drama as a poem, which had the capacity to move, as does a real poem, musically—to affect on a pre-rational level."

"Over the previous ten years, there’d been quite a lot of talk about the regeneration of theatre in poetic terms--Eliot, Fry, Auden," Hall told me. "Harold seemed to me to encompass all that and more. He should be seen as a poetic dramatist. It’s the use of words in an extremely disciplined, contained way. It uses, in fact, all the time-honored devices of rhetoric, but it doesn’t parade them. Harold didn’t want something that made a statement, because a statement was lacking in ambiguity." After years of performing thrillers and melodramas in repertory, Pinter also wanted, he said, "nothing from the bargain basement" of boulevard entertainment. For "The Homecoming," he began with a sentence, the play’s opening words: "What have you done with the scissors?" "I didn’t know who was saying it," he said. "I didn’t know who he was talking to. Now, the fellow he was talking to--if he had said, ‘Oh, I’ve got them right here, Dad,’ there would have been no play. But instead he says, ‘Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?’ Once that’s said, there’s a spring of drama, which develops and follows its own course. I had no idea what the course was going to be. I hadn’t planned anything. In the back of my mind, I think I knew there was another brother going to come back. I think I saw them quite early in a big house, with the doors being taken down, leading to a stairway. I saw them moving in that space."

"An old house in North London": "The Homecoming" ’s first stage direction situates the play both in an internal landscape and in the atmosphere and the idiom of Pinter’s Hackney youth. "It’s all to do with me in some way or another," he said in a television interview in 1965. "You’re not consciously looking back to Hackney, to the life, the values, the threats. Not at all. . . . But it’s a world related to you, otherwise you wouldn’t write it." The play’s dialogue, a kind of constant face-off between characters, is lifted from the Cockney lingua franca with which Pinter and his mates used to tease each other, as well as the local fascists who bullied them. "We’d go into one of their cafés and say, ‘Cup of tea and a sort-out, please,’ " Pinter’s longstanding friend the actor Henry Woolf told me. "We had a few encounters. I’ve seen Harold hold off a whole mob of them."

Even then, among his friends, Pinter was a pathfinder. "He was extremely adventurous," Woolf said. "I must give him credit for that. We were just beginning to trot, and he was galloping. Socially, sexually, he was precocious. He was sniffing around London." In "The Homecoming," the characters also bowl around London--the docks, the West End, Eaton Square, Wormwood Scrubs. Like the claustrophobic dereliction of Max’s house, Hackney was, for Pinter, "a kind of prison." In time, that oppressiveness fuelled a group exodus. One of Pinter’s closest friends, Morris (Moishe) Wernick, having secretly married, immigrated to Canada, where he taught high-school history; eight years later, in 1964--just before "The Homecoming" was written--Wernick returned for the first time to introduce his wife and his children to his father. That situation was Pinter’s springboard. Max was also fabricated partly from Pinter’s Wernick-family memories. "The image of Moishe’s father in cap and plimsolls was one I carried with me," he told Michael Billington. "I knew him to be a pretty authoritarian figure. A really tough old bugger." When Woolf saw the play, he called the resemblance "otherworldly." "Harold had captured the tone of the voice and the environment," he said. "There was just the same sniff in the kitchens of the two houses."

The success of "The Homecoming" catapulted Pinter into an unmooring few years. In 1964, he moved Merchant and their son into an imposing six-story town house on Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. “Nobody just rings the door and comes in,” he said. Antonia Fraser told Billington, “It was the grandest house I’ve ever been in. . . . Every room was immaculate with this terrible silence." As Pinter’s circumstances changed, so did his plays. They became smaller in scale, more internal, more mannered and abstract. (Only in his late masterpiece "Moonlight," of 1993, did Pinter provide a metaphor as searing and complete as in "The Homecoming.") Increasingly cut off by his celebrity from the roiling world that had made him, Pinter soon hit an impasse. "I am writing nothing and can write nothing," he said, while accepting the Shakespeare Prize, in 1970. “I don’t know why. It’s a very bad feeling, I know that, but I must say I want more than anything else to fill up a blank page again, and to feel that strange thing happen, birth through fingertips." He added, "When you can’t write, you feel you’ve been banished from yourself."

Pinter waited out his unconscious by hiring himself out as a director and screenwriter between plays. The screenplays--including "The Quiller Memorandum," "The Go-Between," "Accident," and "Langrishe, Go Down"--allowed him to practice his craft and bide his time until his own characters returned.

In the forty years since the début of "The Homecoming" on Broadway (it received a lukewarm critical reception before becoming a cause célèbre), the play has gone from controversy to classic. As one of drama’s preëminent stylists, Pinter has had the good fortune to live long enough to instruct other theatricals about his idiom and to have enjoyed a number of first-rate productions of his work. In the beginning, "The Homecoming" was a vexing avant-garde conundrum; now it’s essential reading on every modern-theatre syllabus. Time has made the audience and the actors more aware of Pinter’s game; this relaxation allows for a greater appreciation of the gusto of his humor, as well as of his intellectual daring. Among the many pleasures of the current Broadway revival—a fine ensemble, adroit playing, limpid interpretation—the most piquant is the revelation that the play is profoundly funny.

Laughter can excuse many things; here, it triumphs over Eugene Lee’s misjudged set, which sits like a lean-to in the middle of the Cort’s wide stage, flanked on either side by flats designed to look like shiny black brick walls—which have neither the whiff of authenticity nor the appropriate atmosphere of collapse. This incongruity is not as bothersome, however, as the set’s lack of containment—there are no sidewalls—which allows the psychic pressure of the jousting to dissipate somewhat. “What do you think of the room? Big, isn’t it?” Teddy (the excellent James Frain) says, when he introduces Ruth (Eve Best) to the place. The line is startling not because the room is vast but because it isn’t. From the tattered hallway wallpaper and the exposed beams above the living room’s threshold, it’s clear that Max’s house is dilapidated; however, it is still, to my eyes at least, overdecorated, with a colored pitcher and glasses, a mirror, Joey’s dumbbells visible under a record-player. The set does little to enhance the play’s minimalist resonances, but at least it doesn’t impede the nuance of Pinter’s language, which like all great poetry yields up more insight with each viewing.

There are many tasty interpretations here—the punishing punctilio of Michael McKean’s Sam, the lapdog loneliness of Gareth Saxe’s Joey—but Eve Best’s Ruth is the most revelatory. The original Ruth—Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant—was memorable but arch. Best is soft and accessible, which makes Ruth’s battened-down alienation all the more exciting. At one point in Act II, Ruth, perched on the arm of a chair, looking into the middle distance, and holding a cup of coffee, begins to tell Max about her past. “I was . . . different . . . when I met Teddy . . . first.” “No, you weren’t,” Teddy says. “You were the same.” Teddy refuses to see Ruth as she is. Best turns her head away; her cup chinks against the saucer. The sound, like that of a stone dropped into a well, registers the depth of the distance between them.

Best’s articulate energy raises Frain’s game. His Teddy unearths from the script’s buried treasures something new to me: he makes us see the ruthlessness of Teddy’s indifference. Teddy doesn’t give a damn about Ruth. (“You can help me with my lectures when we get back,” he says, by way of trying to lure her home to their American life.) Just as Teddy comes downstairs with their bags packed, Lenny (Raúl Esparza) asks Ruth for a dance. They sway together to a moody tune, then they kiss. As Best pulls out of the embrace, her head tilts back as if she were gulping water after a long thirst. The moment is terrific. Ruth’s desire is finally both acknowledged and answered. Because Best is able to chart this emotional desert with such depth and precision, Ruth’s final line to Teddy as he leaves—“Don’t become a stranger”—illuminates the enormity of her perverse revenge, at once devastating and tormenting.

Ian McShane, as Max, knows the Pinter terrain well; he gets all the music he can out of Max’s scatological rants. Max’s vituperative gas, as McShane deftly demonstrates, is a coverup for his sexual inadequacy. McShane’s biggest acting challenge—he’s a handsome, virile sixty-five—is to make the audience believe in both Max’s age and his impotence. McShane pulls it off, but some padding in his costume and some cumbersome weight on the cane that he brandishes with a majorette’s aplomb wouldn’t go amiss.

“I’ve stopped writing plays,” Pinter told me, as our conversation was drawing to a close. “I’m weary.” The previous week, he’d gone to the hospital for a brain scan. “You know what you’ll find in there,” he had told the lab technician. “A lot of unwritten plays.” I asked him if writing required a ferocity that he no longer had. Pinter smiled wanly. “I still have quite a bit of ferocity knocking around,” he said. “It’s how to embody it.”

Pinter’s literary strength—his easy access to his own turbulent internal climate—has also been his public weakness. The press, which has consistently berated him for what it portrays as his vainglorious diatribes, has never quite understood that his arrogance is the flip side of his brilliance; you couldn’t have the big artist without the big mouth. “I’m well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being ‘enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding,’ ” Pinter said in 1995. “Well, I do have my moods, like anyone else.” To call Pinter’s outbursts “moods” is like calling a tsunami a wave. Pinter, like his characters, is porous; bellicosity is the firewall that he has built against threats to his interior, whether from people or ideas. On the page, his volatility has made art; in life, all too frequently, it makes headlines. It can be argued that Pinter’s dramas, with their undermining of authority and their dissection of the power plays in group dynamics, are essentially political. (The 1984 play “One for the Road” and 1988’s “Mountain Language,” among others, are specifically political plays.) In the last twenty years, as the gaps between plays have grown longer, Pinter has channelled some of his anger onto the world stage. Nothing if not unpredictable—he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (“the most shameful act of my life,” he later said)—he has lent the muscle of his voice to a variety of causes, among them the Sandinistas, the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, the end of the Iraq war, and the trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal. But his preëminent target is American foreign policy. “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” Pinter said in his Nobel speech. In the rhetorical fulminations of his political poetry, he has aspired to smash through America’s self-portrayal “as a force for universal good.” “American Football,” a salvo against the 1991 Gulf War, ends almost as “The Homecoming” does:

For such outcries, Pinter has found himself both lambasted and lampooned. But, since the conferring of the Nobel, and since the fiasco of the current Iraq war has borne out some of Pinter’s dire warnings, the tabloid teasing has diminished, though not Pinter’s attitude toward it. “F**k the press,” he told me, leaning slowly forward. “That is exactly what I felt then, even more so what I feel now.” He paused. “They can just go f**k themselves,” he said. ?

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By MICHAEL KUCHWARA -- December 16
NEW YORK (AP) — Just in time for the holidays comes another bilious family reunion: a revival of "The Homecoming," Harold Pinter's masterful, acid-etched portrait of a tyrannical father and his three sons, undone by a savvy, sexually aware woman.

Now well into middle age, the play (first seen on Broadway in 1967) remains one of Pinter's most durable works, and this admirable production, which opened Sunday at the Cort Theatre, reconfirms its status as a contemporary classic.

Directed by Daniel Sullivan with careful attention to detail (particularly to all those celebrated Pinter "pauses" or moments of silence), "The Homecoming" is, among other things, an eerie, uncomfortable examination of male combativeness, a fraternity of one-upmanship that finally meets its match in the appearance of a female outsider.

But like most Pinter creations, "The Homecoming" defies easy analysis. The play keeps its audience off-kilter, reveling in a sinister yet often humorous uncertainty that persists through its still shocking conclusion.

The setting is a shabby house in North London — designer Eugene Lee's living room is the epitome of drabness — where Max, the father, lords over two of his offspring, Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, a slow-witted, aspiring boxer. Max also emotionally pummels his own brother, Sam, a chauffeur, who also lives with them. They taunt each other and frequently draw blood. Max, the chief tormentor, is portrayed with a pugilistic ferocity by the marvelous Ian McShane. It's no wonder Max was a butcher (now retired) by trade. McShane not only exudes a compelling physical bravado, he handles Pinter's often razor-sharp dialogue with the dexterity of a skilled surgeon.

This antagonistic all-guy environment is interrupted by the unexpected arrival from America of Max's third son, Teddy, a philosophy professor, and his wife, Ruth. Teddy is surprisingly mild mannered; Ruth, unnervingly enigmatic and self-contained.

It makes for a combustible situation, particularly after Ruth is invited to stay on at the family homestead and, with a little help from Lenny, ply her trade in town. Eve Best was a sensational Josie Hogan last season in a revival of Eugene O'Neill's "A Moon for the Misbegotten." As Ruth, she's a different kind of earth mother, more erotically charged, yet distant and forbidding. In this battle of the sexes, she definitely has the upper hand. And gets to display a great pair of legs.

James Frain turns in a fine, deceptively understated performance as her acquiescent husband, and Gareth Saxe personifies dumb brute strength as the would-be prize fighter. They even look as if they might be brothers. And Michael McKean finds exactly the right amount of fussiness in Sam, a chauffeur who takes pride in his work.

More problematic is Raul Esparza, whose rushed, high-pitched delivery often is at odds with the other actors in the production. While his English accent never wavers and he physically gets the creepiness that permeates Lenny, Esparza seems uncomfortable with the deliberate, exacting nature of Pinter's language. And in Pinter, language is all. From such early works as "The Room" and "The Caretaker" right up through more recent efforts such as "Moonlight" and "Ashes to Ashes," linguistic clarity is imperative. Even if an exact meaning can't always be discerned, the theatricality of how Pinter says it can't be denied. And in "The Homecoming," that ambiguity packs quite a wallop.

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December 17, 2007 -- IT was not only the return of Harold Pinter's obliquely mysterious "The Homecoming" after its 1967 premiere, last night's opening at the Cort The atre also marked a homecoming of sorts for its star, Ian McShane.

It is also 40 years ago since McShane made his Broadway debut in "The Promise," by a Soviet writer, Axel Abruzov. It ran for less than three weeks.

Until now McShane, here in the after-glow of American TV fame as the foul-mouthed Al Swearengen in the HBO series "Deadwood," never returned. Welcome back, however belated! He remains a marvelous, compelling actor.

Unlike McShane, this is the third Broadway outing for "The Homecoming," but it is the first cast, led also by Eve Best and Raul Esparza, to match completely the raw excitement of the play's very first trio, in both London and New York: Paul Rogers, Vivian Merchant and Ian Holm.

"The Homecoming" is often called "a comedy of menace," and the director Daniel Sullivan has here wisely made sure that the comedy, essentially the cheerful insolence of the English music hall, shares equal billing with the menace.

The play is an exercise - and here comes the menace - in a great deal of ambiguity and disquieting nuance. Every character seems to say the opposite and to do the opposite to what he earlier said or did. It's as confusing as life itself on a bad day.

And Pinter darts around his own play like a puzzled horsefly, never quite knowing where it, or he, is going next. Which is oddly exciting, keeping you, as it were, upside down on the edge of the underside of your theater seat.

The title "The Homecoming" at first seems to apply to Teddy (James Frain), an English philosophy professor at an American university who, with his English wife of six years, Ruth (Best), unexpectedly turns up late at night at his father's working-class home in North London.

In fact, as the play meanders along its murky, sleazy spirals, it is clearly the calculating Ruth who is coming back - back to her spiritual home as Earth Mother/Madonna/Whore to this sprawling Cockney household of men.

This consists of Teddy's father, Max (McShane), a retired butcher, by turn scurrilous, bullying and unctuous; Teddy's two brothers, Lenny (Esparza), a cool and cocksure pimp, and Joey (Gareth Saxe), a slow aspiring boxer, already slightly punch-drunk, and finally Max's brother, Sam (Michael McKean), a seemingly decent and thus generally bewildered chauffeur.

By the end of the play Ruth is happily installed as mistress of the household, Teddy is on his way back to the United States and the three sons (for Pinter loves symmetry almost as much as incongruity) he and Ruth left behind. Sam is left prostrate on the floor, possibly dead, possibly merely stricken by a heart attack and a Pinter-style pause.

It's a fascinating and entertaining piece, but the play, 40 years on, has not worn as well as I would have expected. Once Pinter was generally regarded as a possible successor to Samuel Beckett in nihilistic existentialism. Now he seems a markedly lesser talent.

Yet it's difficult to imagine an all-over better cast or a more persuasive reading; led by McShane's ugly and embittered patriarch, Esparza's smoothly confident Lenny, Frain's shiftily ambivalent Teddy and the wonderful Best, whose smugly conspiratorial smile, caps the play's ending.

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NEW YORK — The seduction scene in the first act of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming might seem a little unconventional. For starters, the guy, Lenny, is wearing pajamas. And he woos the girl, Ruth, by telling her how he toyed with the idea of killing a woman. Did I mention that Lenny and Ruth are in-laws, and Lenny is a pimp?

Forty years after Homecoming made its Broadway bow, the twisted family ties binding the play remain as luridly fascinating as anything you'll see on cable television. In fact, the spiffy new revival (* * * ½out of four) that opened Sunday at the Cort Theatre stars Ian McShane, recently of HBO's Deadwood, as Max, patriarch of the clan that Ruth marries into.

Max has his own designs on Ruth, and his idea of flirting is similarly complicated, as are his ways of expressing paternal affection and his feelings for his late wife. Then again, in Homecoming, it can be difficult to distinguish love from hate or lust from repulsion. You're just as likely to laugh or cringe at Max and his three sons — Lenny, the oafish, would-be boxer Joey, and the polished Teddy, a professor and Ruth's husband. But despite its dark wit and deliberate ambiguities, or rather because of them, the alienation at the core of Homecoming still feels disturbingly real.

McShane is excellent as Max, who wields a cane and a brutal tongue to compensate for his declining virility. But it would be unfair to single him out; this production is a credit to the whole company, which under Daniel Sullivan's shrewd direction adds to what has been a banner season for ensemble acting on Broadway.

Raul Esparza makes a potently pathetic Lenny, delivering Pinter's trademark pauses with as much rhythmic instinct as he's shown in his varied musical theater roles. James Frain's Teddy has a deadpan poise that makes him convincing both as Max's and Lenny's intellectual superior and their willing sap. Gareth Saxe's rougher, sweeter Joey adds a sense of vulnerability, and Michael McKean's taut performance as Max's brother Sam adds to the tension and humor.

Eve Best rounds out the cast, literally and figuratively, as Ruth. Last seen in New York as the awkward, mannish Josie in last spring's revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten, Best revels in the chance to show off her feminine fire — and a great pair of legs — without sacrificing the air of coolness and control also required by the part.

If you're unfamiliar with Homecoming, suffice to say that you shouldn't fear for this sole female character. She emerges as a formidable player in the men's perverse power games — which you're not advised to try at home.

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I just took in the first act of today's matinee of Cyrano. I chose to leave at intermission because I worked yesterday (Saturday! Oh no!) and most of today. Tonight, I'm going to Opening Night of The Homecoming. Both plays are full of the language of seduction, but oh my, do they turn out differently. Stay tuned for the report of who was there.

I read Pinter's The Homecoming in preparation of this 40 anniversary revival. It's my first Pinter. All I can say is that I really don't get the draw. It's CREEPY, although there are some funny bits. It's very raunchy, disgusting, and above all, twisted family dramedy. It's unlike anything I've ever seen. It makes a certain other drama about a dysfunctional family look like a Sunday picnic. While I can relate to the family in one, and even know people like them, the characters in The Homecoming are unlike any people I've ever known or would even want to know. I saw a rehearsal of this production on November 25th that benefited Broadway Cares. It was interesting to see the progress of the cast.

Even if the material isn't necessarily to my liking, the acting is stellar. Ian McShane is so scary and fierce. James Frain is a wonder. He is always in control, his voice mastering the subtle irony of his character. Eve Best is so subtle, she barely moves her head or makes a gesture, even the blink of her eye is meaningful. Raul Esparza outdoes himself as as a seedy, spoiled character. Gareth Saxe plays slow and dimwitted, perhaps brain damaged, very well. I love Michael McKean. He plays the only decent chracter in the bunch.

The house was full of stars for opening night - perennial first nighter Marian Seldes was there, of course. What a night at the theatre be without dear Marian? I told her that I'm planning to see her tomorrow night at the reading of Pygmalian at Project Shaw. She told me, "Write nice things so Noah will produce me in something." Marian, have no fear. Among the celebrities I saw: Deanna Dunagan, Susan Graham, Chris Noth (who is even more handsome in person), Tamara Tunie, Frances Sternhagen, Joan Rivers (who out-glammed everyone in the house), Anthony Edwards, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Stephanie March, Zeljko Ivanek, Tyne Daly, David Selby...

I was invited to the party at Bond 45 but I'm dead tired. Me, pass up a party? Well, I have to be at the office at 7:00 tomorrow and have a lot to cram in this week - Pygmalion! Sweeney Todd! Office Party! Christmas shopping! A flight to Texas!!! Oh dear.

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(Cort Theater; 1,084 seats; $98.50 top) A Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara & Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Prods., Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Fillerman/Lynne Peyser, Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz presentation in association with Joseph Piacentile of a play in two acts by Harold Pinter. Directed by Daniel Sullivan.

Max - Ian McShane
Lenny - Raul Esparza
Ruth - Eve Best
Sam - Michael McKean
Teddy - James Frain
Joey - Gareth Saxe

Cole Porter was wrong. Then again, he wasn't thinking of Harold Pinter when he observed in "Anything Goes" that what was once considered shocking could be softened into innocuousness by the passing of a few decades. In "The Homecoming," his enigmatic 1965 masterwork about power and desire, Pinter aimed to leave his audience unsure, unsettled, stimulated and appalled. That result is undimmed in Daniel Sullivan's diamond-edged Broadway revival. The director's lucid, unblinking work is matched by a riveting ensemble, their vileness inching under the skin in ways as psychologically disturbing as they are theatrically bracing.

Sullivan steers away from the trap of over-interpreting Pinter. This is a cryptic play in which every chiseled line is loaded and every sculpted silence even more so. But its capacity to mesmerize lies in its mystery. We watch the characters unleash unspeakable emotional violence upon each other, their mean-spirited, manipulative behavior rooted in histories and pathologies made all the more unnerving by being merely suggested. But even while withholding a full understanding of what drives the characters' actions, the play confronts its audience with the uncomfortable truth that there's a little of their base, animalistic cunning in all of us.

What we do know is that something profoundly unwholesome permeates the old North London house shared by four men, rendered here by designer Eugene Lee as a place where the walls, the carpets and the faded furniture all reek of decay and neglect.

Into that environment steps Teddy (James Frain), a philosophy professor at an American college who returns after a six-year absence with wife Ruth (Eve Best) to visit his childhood home. Bad move. "Why don't we have a nice cuddle and kiss, eh?" says Teddy's father Max (Ian McShane), a retired butcher. "Like the old days?" The menace, resentment and oblique hints of past sexual abuse that hang thickly in the air make it clear paternal affection is not on the menu.

No less ambiguous is the welcome extended by Teddy's brothers, dapper Soho pimp Lenny (Raul Esparza) and doltish mouth-breather Joey (Gareth Saxe), an aspiring boxer. Only Max's brother Sam (impeccably understated Michael McKean) seems genuinely fond of his nephew. A chauffeur pathetically gratified by the patronizing endorsements of his wealthy American clients, Sam is the only person on stage with more than a shred of humanity but in this company, that translates as crippling weakness.

With a malevolent glint in his eye and that deep growl of a voice spewing both veiled insults and vicious antagonisms, McShane's Max is not entirely unrelated to his magnificently heartless Al Swearengen from HBO's "Deadwood." The fundamental difference is the aging Max's awareness of his diminishing rule. Even as he wields his walking stick like a truncheon, his anger seems fueled by the certainty that his strength is fading. Rotten to the core, Max is a tremendous role and McShane bites into it with glistening fangs.

Ready to challenge Max on every front is smug, sneering Lenny, played by Esparza not as a physical bully but a psychological one. This approach is especially effective in Lenny's extended monologues, in his initial cat-and-mouse game with Ruth and in his sickening boasts about brutalizing other women.

But it appears the right to rule the house and sit in the most comfortable chair might end up going to neither Max nor Lenny once Ruth clocks how best to milk the set-up to her own advantage. Refining a simple blink of her eyes or a subtle sideways shift of her head into an artful slow-motion performance piece, Best's imperturbable outsider has a quality that all five of the men jockeying around her for power or attention lack: She's adaptable.

The mother-whore dichotomy that dictates the male characters' attitude to women here is at its purest in Max, who speaks of his late wife one minute in sainted terms as "the backbone of this family" and as a "slutbitch" the next. Similarly, the horrifying insults he hurls at Ruth by way of a greeting are followed later by praise: "She's a lovely girl. A beautiful woman. And a mother too." Sullivan plays this volatile material to perfection, as evidenced by the uneasiness of the laughter rippling through the audience.

Ruth's intuitive understanding of those conflicting needs -- of how suspicion of her sexual power feeds the men's urge to humiliate and dominate her, but also how their lust and their sad need to be mothered makes them easy prey -- allows her to remain in command, even as Frain's spineless Teddy looks on in festering silence.

To go back to the Cole Porter song, "a glimpse of stocking" plays a key role here, when Ruth takes hold of a wayward philosophical argument about being and not-being. With supreme calm, she reclaims her position at the center of everyone's focus through sly self-objectification. "Look at me," she purrs. "I ... move my leg. That's all it is. But I wear ... underwear ... which moves with me ... it ... captures your attention."

In a performance of icy-cool poise made even more arresting because it follows Best's last Broadway appearance as Eugene O'Neill's ungainly cow of a farm girl in "A Moon for the Misbegotten," the scene has a sinister smoothness that makes Sharon Stone's "Basic Instinct" leg-crossing act seem like oafish burlesque.

Regardless of the sordidness of Max and Lenny's plan to exploit Ruth, she never loosens her control of the situation, and her willingness to take such an unlikely avenue out of a mundane life as traditional wife and mother makes her the most complex character onstage. The hypnotic play closes with a pieta tableau in which a satisfied smile spreads slowly across Best's face, leaving little doubt about how the diseased family unit's redistribution of power will play out.

Set, Eugene Lee; costumes, Jess Goldstein; lighting, Kenneth Posner; sound, John Gromada; fight direction, Rick Sordelet; technical supervision, Hudson Theatrical Associates; production stage manager, Roy Harris. Opened Dec. 16, 2007. Reviewed Dec. 13. Running time 2 Hours.

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Whether he's playing a ruthless town boss in "Deadwood" or the brutish Max in The Homecoming, when Ian McShane is bad, he's very, very good.

Two fluttery birds, leaving a coffee shop in the East 30s, stopped by a table near the door and asked the husky, saturnine man sitting there: "Are you Ian McShane?" When he acknowledged he was, they giggled and scurried out. "Brits," said McShane dryly, "taking advantage of the dollar."

He himself is a Scot, or mostly Scot, even if, he says, "the 'Mc' in the name means there must be Irish way back." The genealogy of Max, the coarse, tyrannical paterfamilias McShane plays in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming at the Cort Theatre, is of no consequence. What counts is the lip-licking avidity with which the old guy agrees to put his daughter-in-law from America "on the game" as a Greek Street whore (". . . that's a stroke of genius, that's a marvelous idea"). Her earnings will support Max and two of his sons — a third son is the young woman's husband — in their desolate North London quarters. Pure evil.

Well, not altogether evil, says McShane, who is most familiar to Americans as the unscrupulous saloonkeeper Al Swearengen in HBO's "Deadwood." "Max has more than one dimension," said McShane in the wake of the departing birds. "Like Swearengen, who came off in the beginning as the baddest man in the world, but there was more to it than that. Max and Lenny" - the son who's had that marvelous idea of putting his sister-in-law to work on her back - "share the same sharp, tough, brutish, Hobbesian view of the world." [Philosopher Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679: "The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."]

"Harold shares that, too," said McShane. He has known Harold Pinter since he, McShane, played brash, aggressive Mick in a two-hour British TV production of Pinter's The Caretaker in 1966. "Harold is not the dark Darth Vader presence people think he is. People put that aura on him. 'It's Pinter! It's Beckett! Ohhhh!'" the actor squealed in his best baritone. "'Enigmatic' is the word I would use for Harold."

McShane's arrival on Broadway in The Homecoming invokes a certain symmetry, for himself and for the show. In 1967, one year after he'd done that televised Caretaker, the 25-year-old actor made his first and until now only appearance on Broadway, as a young survivor of the siege of Leningrad in a play by Alexei Arbuzov called The Promise. The other two young actors - it was a two-men-and-a-girl love story - were Ian McKellen and Eileen Atkins. "The trouble with that," McShane said now, "was that Eileen has never been 17 in her life." But that isn't what closed the show - a hit in London - after 35 NYC performances. "I don't think the U.S. was ready for the Russians. Last night I received an e-mail from Ian: 'Hope you last longer than we did.'"

If all goes well, the limited engagement at the Cort will run into mid-April. Co-starring with McShane are Raúl Esparza, Eve Best, Michael McKean, James Frain and Gareth Saxe. The director is Daniel Sullivan. It's a 40th Broadway anniversary for The Homecoming, too. In that same year of 1967 — the year covered, McShane notes, in William Goldman's diaristic book "The Season" - Pinter's classic-to-be made its American bow with Paul Rogers, Ian Holm and Vivien Merchant (the then-Mrs. Harold Pinter). Another link: In 1962, two years after his graduation from RADA - the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - McShane was in a film called "The Wild and the Willing" as a student who has an affair with his professor's wife. The professor was played by Paul Rogers - "a sweet man" - who was so terrifying as old Max in The Homecoming. "Paul was actually a young man then." Two beats. "People were older then."

McShane is asked if he's ever known anyone like Max in what's called real life. "No. Oh no. I don't think anyone has known a Max. It's very difficult to cross Dick Cheney with George Carlin, you know."

Was doing "Deadwood" fun? "Fantastic. Like doing a film, a workshop and a play all at the same time. David Milch [creator and executive producer] knew what the scenes were, and gave them to you day to day. Nothing improvised. And all this on a ranch north of Los Angeles. So you were totally in that world. You went in, held your balls - and jumped."

The actor's parents, Harry McShane and Irene Cowley McShane ("my mother is English") are in their 80s now and still going strong. They met at age 16 when Harry McShane came down from Scotland to Blackburn, England - where their son Ian would be born, September 29, 1942 - to apprentice as a footballer (soccer, to us) with the Blackburn Rovers. Harry soon found a career as "what was then called a No. 11 - a small, speedy, Scottish left-winger" on the great Manchester United team. (In 1958, two years after he called it a career, around half that team died in a plane crash at Munich.)

But another kind of talent was quickly spotted by Leslie Ryder, a teacher at Stretford Grammar School. "He came and said, 'You're going to play this part'" in what turned out to be Jean-Paul Sartre's Nekrassov. "After that I did Cyrano, at 16, and then I joined the National Youth Theatre, the first member not to come from London, and then RADA and that's it. My last time as a civilian. Been an actor ever since."

And he is married to an actress, Gwen Humble, whom he met when they were both in a 1980 movie called "Cheaper to Keep Her." "She's from Detroit, so I have to be a Red Wings and Tigers fan." His two grown children from an earlier marriage are not in theatre. "Very smart of them." Pinter's Max would put it another, and less polite, way.

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NEW YORK -- It's that time of year again, when we enter the holidays thinking, "Am I really from the same family as these people, or even the same planet?"

But imagine looking around the room and seeing Al Swearingen, the foul-mouthed and despotic saloon owner from "Deadwood"; David St. Hubbins, the daft, solipsistic lead singer from Spinal Tap, and Bobby, the uncommitted ladies' man of "Company."

The 40th anniversary production of Harold Pinter's often enigmatic "The Homecoming," opening tomorrow at Broadway's Cort Theatre, certainly has top-flight talent -- starting with Ian McShane, Michael McKean and Raúl Esparza -- but to shock and stir an audience, the play's characters must seem like a genuine family, even (or especially) as they attack and betray each other.

The flashpoint for this endless power struggle of a show is the return of Teddy (James Frain) to his testosterone-fueled British household. In residence are his uncle, two brothers, and most notably his father, Max (McShane), the diminished patriarch who fights to maintain his tyrannical hold on the clan. When Teddy brings his sexy and manipulative wife, Ruth (recent Tony nominee Eve Best), home from America, he incites a maelstrom of malevolence that permanently alters the family dynamic.

While the vicious psychological warfare goes far beyond what most people experience (or inflict) during the holidays, Esparza, who plays the sinister and scheming son, Lenny, says, "It doesn't take a huge leap of faith to see the worst qualities in your own family and recognize them in this one." McShane adds that much of the antipathy aimed at Teddy comes from the fact that, for all their dysfunction, the men essentially believe in an unspoken rule: "We are a unit, and you broke that up when you left."

Before the cast could tackle the challenges posed by works of the 77-year-old British playwright -- the pauses, the hidden meanings -- they had to establish that familial bond, especially because half the cast is English and half is American. (Although, McKean points out, he's best known for playing an Englishman, while McShane is best known for playing an American.) Given the subject matter, that sense of family was made easier, the stars say, because they clicked immediately. "We're always cracking each other up," Esparza says.

The cast mates have detected a resemblance in each other's noses and eyes, as well as in personality and behavior, Esparza adds. "We're always looking for ways in which we are similar to each other or to each other's fathers and sons," he explains. "That helps reinforce the sense -- it doesn't have anything specific to do with what we do with each other on stage, but it informs our performances."

Esparza credits McShane, who has the most experience with Pinter (he starred in a 1965 TV production of "The Caretaker," has appeared in several staged plays, and knows Pinter person