If James Frain is to be believed, every British actor worth his salt has a Harold Pinter story. "If you're an English actor, you have to know Pinter. He's our Beckett, our Mamet, our Miller," said Frain as rehearsals began last month for the star-studded new Broadway revival of Pinter's sexy, unsettling comedy The Homecoming.Trouble is, though he counted himself an avid fan, Frain didn't yet have his own Pinter anecdote. The closest he had was a secondhand tale, on loan from one of his co-stars on the Showtime series The Tudors, Nick Dunning, who played the part of the cuckold Freddy in a 2001 Homecoming revival featuring Ian Holm as the fearsome patriarch Max.
"I kept bugging Nick for a Pinter story," Frain confessed of his time on the Tudors set. "So he finally told me that one day Pinter came and watched a rehearsal and gave just one note at the end: He said, 'It was too Pinter-esque.' He doesn't say a lot, but what he does say is very loaded."
Indeed, a laconic touch and a predilection for long, pointed pauses constitute the popular image of Pinter's plays, almost to the point of risking self-parody. As Frain said of the playwright, "I think he hates that 'Pinter-esque' has become a kind of genre, because then form has really escaped content."
It's the content as much as the form that Frain is digging into for the part of Freddy--arguably the most mysterious figure in a play full of half-buried motives and shady cross-purposes. It is the weirdly passive Freddy, a literary professor who returns to his childhood home in East London after years in America, who allows his wife to become a sort of booby prize for his brothers and father. What's up with that?
"There's a sort of enigma at the heart of it, and the temptation is to say, 'What are they really talking about? What's really going on?' " Frain admitted. "If it's done right, you'll be too busy laughing and being moved to notice all the undercurrents, but you'll definitely leave thinking about them.
"It's really kind of mythic," Frain continued, warming to the subject. "This is what Pinter has to say about the family, and it ain't cute. It unsettles you; it grates and disturbs. That's the intention; it doesn't satisfy itches we're used to having scratched."
The key, Frain said, is to appreciate the play's mythic element. For all their grit and apparent kitchen-sink realism, Pinter's plays, Frain said, can be as extreme as Greek tragedy in their way.
"To interrogate this as a naturalistic play is to miss it," Frain pointed out. "You sort of have to play it as a classic play disguised as a naturalistic one." There are several similar contradictions bound up in the work: "It's normal speech, but it's poetic. It's funny but brutal; devastating but hilarious.
"Peter Hall, who directed many of the plays originally, has talked about the precise orchestration of the dialogue--it's very deliberately scored, even the famous use of pauses.
Frain has a special affinity with The Homecoming, he said, because a dramatist friend of his wouldn't stop raving about it.
"I was introduced to it by an enthusiastic writer friend who said he was inspired to become a writer because of it," Frain said. As it turned out, such friendly hype only made Frain initially wary. "I was so nervous that I was going to be underwhelmed that I took a long time before I read it. But I wasn't, of course. I knew about Pinter before that, but this was the play where I really got it."
Broadway audiences are likely to feel the same when The Homecoming, now in previews, opens on Dec. 16.