The Homecoming – Young Vic

Pinter’s The Homecoming is one of the writer’s most accessible works, requiring the least decoding outside the core story set in a bristling domestic world run entirely by men. But while the temptation might be to assume that the essential purpose is all brooding masculinity and meaningful pauses, there is far more to Pinter’s play than that, showcasing the writer’s great skill as both a poet and a linguist. The scenario that he constructs in The Homecoming is strongly character-driven, couched in a particular experience of working class manliness in the era of the play. It emerges from the experience of two different generations across the twentieth-century as alternative ways of living contend, and in which the absence of a matriarch has shaped the blurring of traditional gender roles in ways that feel transgressive for 1965. Pinter’s creation of the male voice in the play, the very particular rhythm of their banter, the degree of over-familiarity with one another within a family and the obsession with identity-forming storytelling is extraordinarily sharp in Matthew Dunster’s production for the Young Vic which opens this week.

The last major production of The Homecoming was strikingly different, a Jamie Lloyd treatment full of warped bombast, a black and red vision of masculine intensity that had Lloyd’s trademark heightened but revelatory style. Superb as that was back in 2015, Dunster opts for something more naturalistic, placing the play and the relationships that Pinter creates in a more recognisable setting to draw out the levels of relatability in the story. It is a different kind of power to the one that Lloyd elicited, and one that brings a strong resonance to tone and technique in the writing, where every word may feel casual and insignificant, even tangential, but it is carefully chosen to convey a particular meaning, suggest a cultural and class-based backstory and to explore the ways in which vocabulary and sentence structure alter behaviour and perspective.

The words are immensely important in Pinter’s writing and Dunster’s 130-minute production which includes the interval, makes plenty of space for them to emerge and hang in the air. This is a play not just about men but about brothers and about fathers and sons, so what they say to each other has added purpose – rarely is it instructive or merely conversational but instead become weapons of power and control over one another, used to re-establish dynamics of authority, emphasise longevity and experience as well as to belittle and demean. That this occurs in the family context creates opportunities for Pinter to introduce different types of contextual short-hand, showing the audience where the weak spots are, how each individual reacts when pressed into a corner and the ingrained reaction to each other’s speech. Sometimes there is fight in these conversations, notably a pedantic desire to correct each other’s grammar or pick holes in a story, and other times there is just silence, individuals pretending not to listen in order to goad the speaker.

When the characters speak to one another in the play their linguistic choices and delivery tell us much about the kind of man they are and their background. Patriarch Max frequently loses himself in stories of his glory years, when he was a young man to be reckoned with and his quick temper erupts throughout the play. Yet Pinter gives him many speeches about being a doting dad, a widower who almost fondly recalls bathing his children and caring for them, even opening the play with demands from the household that he cook their dinner. This impression that Max wants to give of violence and power, the head of a family that has disappointed him is constantly undercut by these domestic and maternal duties. And Dunster’s homely thrust staging, designed by Moi Tran, creates that world of economised comfort and good order that underpins the words that Pinter gives to these men to talk about themselves.

And they often talk in stories, self-mythologised anecdotes designed to convey a particular impression of the speaker for the person they are trying to impress. Max reels off several stories to his middle son Lenny while the latter attempts to convey his own careless power to new arrival Ruth, the sister-in-law who arrives out of the blue. And again Pinter holds these two things in tension, the contrast between what these men say about themselves and how they really behave, responding to the shifting authority within the household as Ruth, the classic Pinter interloper, disrupts the status quo. There is a real clarity about that in Dunster’s production in this large living room set where characters can be close up and far apart, a dance the director has them weave around one another as they try to convince Ruth they are a force to be reckoned with while still fixing her drinks and smoothing out the antimacassars. What is really interesting about this interpretation of The Homecoming is the recognition that male-dominated though the plays may be on the surface, Pinter actually gives the real power to women.

Dunster’s approach really brings out the importance of Max’s wife Jessie and the vast absence that her death has left behind. These are throw away references in the text, she is mentioned a number of times but Pinter leaves the audience to connect the dots, assuming that the men have learned to take care of themselves without her. In reality they are waiting for someone like Ruth to take over the household, not to cook, clean and potentially prostitute herself to pay for her keep as they intend, but to control and manage them. Dunster makes this clear in the centrality he gives to Jessie’s absence in the play, keeping a single chair vacant throughout, a sacred place that no one is willing to touch. Both Lenny and elder brother Teddy sit briefly in their father’s chair when he is not in the room, actively and aggressively asserting themselves against his authority by doing so, but the three brothers including youngest son Joey, Max and Uncle Sam continually look to Jessie’s empty seat throughout often without realising their eye is drawn to it, physically hovering close by but never daring to sit as though eager for her approval and fearing it would be denied them.

And it casts the gendered relationships in the play in a different light as a result. Dunster leaves the audience to question whether Max’s family was always this way and hasn’t recently assumed ‘feminine’ duties because Jessie died. Does Max’s comment about bathing the children now suggest he was left to do most of the childcare because his wife was really in control? The ease with which Ruth casts a spell over the men certainly reinforces this possibility and, again, it is notable in this controlled but spacious production that their words are full of intent to govern her when she is out of the room, determining ownership of her body and its function, but they quickly bow to her when she returns, fixing their eyes on her as they do the vacant chair and complying with her demands. The ending as a result becomes more terrible, the realisation in the dying moments of the play all the clearer for subtly reinforcing the female power base that really underpins the dynamic in this household.

And it is through the continued presence of Jessie that the audience is able to access another important dimension to both The Homecoming and to Pinter’s work more broadly which examines this interplay between memory and periods of transition which, whether the characters recognise it or not, defines their status within the drama. In Dunster’s production, time seems to stand still, a group of men locked into a fixed routine, a cycle of waiting that is about to be broken by Ruth who represents their future and the past simultaneously, evoking memories of Jessie. Yet through the sexualisation of her relationship with all of the family members it takes them into a new phase of life. Although The Homecoming is not a memory play per se, its reliance on remembrances to construct character and the way memories are used to reinforce power dynamics is really important. Why else does Lenny tell the story of a woman he rejected at the dockside, Sam talks about Jessie riding in the back of his car or, crucially, Ruth mentioning a modelling assignment in the countryside except to create a particular effect in the present, one that reinforces the allure, influence or physicality they want their conversation partner to respond to.

In designing this into the production, Tran uses lighting effects to create and mark out these moments of illusion, blending fragile mint colours that give the stage a ghostly effect with stark square cut outs that highlight significant beats and changes of direction. The cast too respond to these physical alterations in the environment by heightening or relaxing their performance as the mood and intensity develop across the story with the central trio, Lisa Diveney’s Ruth, Jared Harris’s Max and Joe Cole’s Lenny brilliantly providing the central power play. Harris throws off some of his reputation for poised, well-spoken characters with a gruff working-class masculinity, an irascible older man sensing his waning physical and manipulative power as a younger, more virile generation seeks to take his place. It is a classic Pinter trope, and Harris creates that stage dominance, snapping and shouting at his sons, continually demanding the respect he feels he has earned as the family elder for which his memory stories are indicative. The glee Harris’s Max evokes as plans for Ruth come together offers a nice range to this performance before Max is broken by the well-staged conclusion.

Cole, likewise, is very comfortable on this stage, channeling a nimble Danny Dyer in his use of menace that disguises itself behind comedy and sarcasm. That Lenny is part of a much bigger, seedy underworld is hinted at throughout the play and Cole clearly revels in the playful danger of Lenny, an intimidating presence, often announced by his shadow appearing from another room before launching into monologues that look to secure his dominance. There is great nuance here too, an introversion or at least a holding back in the presence of his father while Lenny’s responses to Ruth are possessive but ultimately all talk, eyeing her as a leader by the end of the play.

The presentation of Ruth is essential if The Homecoming is to work and Diveney brings just the right balance of fear and flirtation as she manoeuvers her way into the household. It is entirely ambiguous whether this is a deliberate plan from the outset or an opportunistic one, but the steely strength in Diveney’s Ruth turns all situations to her advantage. This is a character who uses her beauty and desirability to gain control so Diveney peppers her performance with warm and inviting smiles to all of the men as she passes them, yet appears grave and in awe, even frightened at other times. Ruth never concedes, even on whether she has finished a glass of water, and this watchful performance completes the predatory nature of the central trio.

The smaller roles – David Angland as Joey, Robert Emms as Teddy and Nicholas Tennant as Sam – are just as accomplished, filling out the ensemble family dynamic with performances that emphasise their own needs while facilitating the behaviours of others, and are vital to the maintenance of tone in Dunster’s engaging and illuminating production. Most of all, this version of The Homecoming showcases and revels in Pinter’s mastery of language and its application, every word thrumming with significance even before all of the tricks of the theatre are applied to staging this great play.

The Homecoming is at the Young Vic until 27 January with tickets from £10. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Chasing Hares – Young Vic

Exploitation can take many forms and sometimes it even begins with a creative opportunity. Sonali Bhattacharyya’s lead character in new play Chasing Hares takes a while to find themselves confronting a major moral dilemma but the road to it begins with storytelling, imagination and character creation. Bhattacharyya is interested in where these stories come from, what they represent and their meaning to the individuals and local groups from which they emerge. A play that navigates the hope and aspiration of working class communities in urban India yearning for rural and natural landscapes set against the cold political and economically deprived reality, Chasing Hares experiments with its theatrical form.

Dramas about strikes and factory unrest tend to follow a defined pattern, one in which solidarity and the humanity of the workers is developed before unfolding heroic, David versus Goliath tales of standing up to management in the pursuit of liberty and equality. Stage musical Made in Dagenham and the recent Shake the City appearing in Jermyn Street Theatre’s Footprint’s Festival are jaunty perspectives about female unionisation and pay disputes while a defining work like Lynne Nottage’s Sweat was not so much a play but a howl of pain for one-industry towns in rust belt America decimated by the move to imported cheaper labour.

Chasing Hares sits somewhere between these extremes, using allegory and theatre to create visual spectacle but equally concerned with the plight of factory workers in Kolkata where jobs are scarce and a major international contract creates a mad scramble to make money. And like Nottage, Bhattacharyya focuses on the difficult middle management role when Prab a former worker is raised to a position of power and ultimately compromised by it as he chooses between protecting his own salary for the sake of his young family and, in the face of unscrupulous management that pushes against his moral code, the pressure to care for the people in his charge.

But while politically fired, this is not a story in which right and wrong are presented as black and white concepts, and more than once Bhattacharyya notes the central character’s active consent to the events of the play and, despite his history as a former activist and agitator, we see Prab’s willingness to ‘sell-out’ his ideals for material comforts and, more seriously, to advance his creative ambitions. But there are other compromises too and while the workers of the Khub Bhalo factory are never seen, their financial desperation forces them to take significant risks, putting themselves in danger in ways that inform the ethical quandary at the heart of the show.

But Bhattacharyya’s point is an important one, mirrored in a modern-day conclusion based in the UK, that argues choice in these circumstances is a misleading concept when social constructs of power, money and influence create the conditions in which one group of people can exploit another. What the factory families chose to do may be morally and ethically troubling and the owners may argue that all applications to work are voluntarily given, but ultimately Bhattacharyya shows there is no other option when the alternative is to go without an income, food or housing.

Bhattacharyya dramatises that through the gentle rise and trajectory of Prab’s family, growing from a small set of rooms where they live with his wife’s mother to regular work, a stable job and the chance to live in a better neighbourhood. At the start of the play, Prab is one of many out of worker breadwinners who stalk the factory gates every morning in the hope that it will reopen and work will be plentiful. But Bhattacharyya creates conditions in which contracts are awarded to competitors operating at lower cost and the regular early morning clamber for work is a futile hope in an area in terminal decline. The sudden end to the drought brings with it another set of problems, an employers market in which the factory owners can offer almost any terms and still be inundated with applicants. And slowly Bhattacharyya starts to tip the balance where opportunity becomes no choice at all.

The journey that Prab is taken on is a complicated one as he navigates the shift from worker to manager urged by his wife, Kajol, to remain passive and do whatever is asked him of him to protect their young family. As the rewards for that flood in, improving their financial and, to a degree, their social status, Bhattacharyya’s Prab is troubled by the consequences that give grounding to the play, turning what could be a solely high-minded story about workers’ rights into a more complicated portrait of individual, family and social needs conflicting across the experience of one man.

The extent to which the protagonist is taken in by the factory owner’s son Devesh who is also a theatre performer is shaped by Prab’s personal desire for creative recognition and fulfillment, when an opportunity to write and perform alongside him and fellow actor, Chellam, in a Jatra troupe presents itself after a night at her show. It is an unusual entry point to the play’s central dilemma but it does create depth in the characterisation by giving Prab a separate interior life and aspiration that Bhattacharyya intricately works into his political ideals, creating opportunities to compromise Prab with multiple implications for his professional integrity as well as his morality. But the writer is also arming her character, giving him different ways to reach the same audience of workers by looking to the social power of theatre to reflect and inspire.

This leads into the world of narrative and imagination that anchors the play and Bhattacharyya has Prab create an allegory that runs through the show, an original piece that speaks to the mystical traditions of India storytelling with its fairytale characteristics including an oppressed princess, talking animals and an evil landlord destroying the natural habitat but with fervent political undertones that speak to worker conditions and the possibility of a utopian equality. Bhattacharyya feeds the audience this story in chapters running throughout the show, told first to Prab’s baby as he tries to lull her to sleep and later as acted scenes performed by Prab’s famous new friends as he dramatises his imagined world for them.

What Bhattacharyya is doing here is quite interesting, on the one hand exploring the consistency of these ideal societies, partly referencing communism but also deeper traditions in not just Indian writing but in broader international romantic responses to the growing pressures and confinement of urbanisation. This fantasy world that Prab creates is entirely rural and equitable – there would have to be a lot of meetings as one character jokes but there is a wistfulness in the creation of these places that is both aspirational and, the storyteller knows, almost certainly unachievable. For Prab and Chellam the question becomes to what degree are they motivated to do something, to make a small difference while all the time knowing what they truly want is nothing but fantasy.

In order to tell his tale, Prab allows himself to be bought, initially for financial security but also for art, to be able to work with creative people. His head is turned by their flattery and interest in his ideas, giving him a platform that it takes him some time to recognise and use, eventually prompted by events elsewhere in the play. But there are other costs too, not just to his integrity but there is a price to speaking out both in muted and amplified forms which are explored in the final section of the play as the consequences of the two sides of his life come together, that in themselves create a whole new direction for his family. Within Chasing Hares then, Bhattacharyya asks what power does a story have and what should be the cost?

In staging the play, designer Moi Tran has appropriately created two playing spaces, parallel stages, one of which sits in recess. And across them the two worlds of Chasing Hares intersect – Prab’s reality and the illusory dramas performed by the actors allowing director Milli Bhatia to move between these stories, retaining their distinction but blending them and their outcomes together. Akhila Krishnan’s striking video design projects across the stage, creating spectacle by filling it with an animated version of the forest landscape that Prab develops in his mind, unfolding its trees, creatures and tonal shifts as he recounts his dark but hopeful story.

Across the piece, Krishnan’s work begins to creep into the sparse simplicity of the everyday that Tran implies with only a few props to represent the changing spaces from family homes to the factory floor and its backrooms. The appearance of silhouetted birds edging into the corners of this story is pointed, taking on a foreboding quality that adds to the atmosphere. Jai Morjaria’s lighting and Tran’s costume contrast these subtle moments with an explosion of theatricality when the actors perform with interesting reflections on the visual effects of messaging and, as our very best political theatre shows, commentary and entertainment need not be mutually exclusive.

Irfan Shamji as Prab settles into his role quickly, a likable lead that the audience can invest in and follow through the stories as a representation of thousands of similar lives. Shamji moves well between the straightforward scenes in which Prab comes to understand his own limits and the jackanory moments in which he conjures a whole world for baby Amba, although really for the audience. A good man in an impossible situation, the character grows in confidence as Chasing Hares unfolds and Shamji captures well the energy and enthusiasm for Prab’s creative endeavors, his increasingly troubled conscience and the pressure to hold onto any job for the sake of his family.

Zainab Hasan as his pragmatic wife Kajol offers a contrast, a woman who knows the price of things and wants to make less high-minded choices but nonetheless complements Prab as a partner. It would be useful to see more of her perspective, particularly as she too works multiple jobs and is the primary carer for Amba but Hasan makes much from the material she has. Scott Karim brings nuance to the show’s main baddie Devesh who could easily have become a bland boo-hiss villain. Instead, there is personality in his lack of empathy and ability to manipulate that make Karim a strong and compelling presence on stage. As is Ayseha Darker’s Chellam, a starlet tired of the classic works she must endlessly perform and eager to tackle something more meaningful. But Chellam is also a character with some depth and a similar pragmatism that makes her almost cynically dismissive of her work until inspired by Prab’s writing. Darker also has great comic timing and a cutting delivery that brings some alternative moments of levity to the piece.

Chasing Hares is a short play, running at just over two hours with an interval and there is much in this world particularly among the secondary characters and their motivations that could be expanded. Not seeing the factory workers isn’t a problem given the play’s setting in middle management and domestic spaces but towards the end a sense of the widespread fervour for change and the impact of Prab’s actions on the community needs a little more might behind it. Nonetheless, Bhattacharyya’s play is packed with commentary about the power structures that support political and economic elites, the limits to freedom of choice and the optimistic possibilities of one great story as the means to tear it all down.

Chasing Hares is at the Young Vic until 13 August with tickets from £12.50. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.