Of power struggles and family politics

[attach id="249727" size="medium"]Colin Willis and Joe Pace play two brothers with opposing characters in The Homecoming.[/attach]

Theatre
The Homecoming
MADC Clubrooms

Power struggles and family politics are tough waters to navigate, but when several male egos struggling for dominance are suddenly unsettled by a single, electric female presence, then the sparks really do start flying.

MADC’s Playhouse production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming worked very well.

The Playhouse is a concept formed last year to bridge the theatre company’s large-scale productions with their in-house work. It includes a blend of seasoned actors and newer faces, and in this case their endeavours have really paid off.

The ensemble worked off each others’ vibes well and gave a solid performance

Pinter’s ground-breaking absurdist piece was powerful on its first staging because it laid bare the human psyche in its rawest form.

Director Chris Hudson’s conceptualisation of the set – which must always fulfil certain criteria stipulated by Pinter in his stage directions – was effective both aesthetically and functionally. The small performance space on the stage at the MADC Clubrooms took the stark white, streamlined and clinical set well.

It was the ideal expository backdrop to the simmering tensions between the two generations of men in a motherless working-class family.

When Michael Mangion’s Teddy, the eldest of three siblings, returns from the US with his wife Ruth, played by Nicola Abela Garrett, he unwittingly sets a series of reactions in quick motion.

As the most accomplished of his father Max’s three sons, Teddy has acquired a middle-class outlook as a professor of philosophy at an American university, and this does not sit well with his brothersLenny and Joey – played by Stefan Farrugia and Yannick Massa respectively.

Mangion’s pretentious Teddy contrasts strongly with Abela Garrett’s clearly dissatisfied Ruth, who realises that she has a lot more in common with his family than she lets on.

Colin Willis’s Max is a disagreeable and argumentative pater familias who bullies his brother Sam, played sensitively by Joe Pace – a quieter and rather less alpha male than his butcher brother used to be, or indeed still is.

The ensemble worked off each others’ vibes well and gave a solid performance which held the weight of Pinter’s complex psychological analysis. Farrugia’s Lenny was exuding Soho from his sleazy slick-back to his innuendo with Ruth, but could have done with slowing down the delivery of some of his lines.

Abela Garrett’s Ruth is a smoking femme fatale whose obvious sexuality hides a more blatant use of power which she unleashes in the presence of men who at first disparagingly think her a whore, only to desire her to be one later – a wish which she encourages and complies with to the point of getting off spectacularly with Massa’s impressionable Joey in front of her husband and the rest of the family.

Seemingly unperturbed, Teddy gives his wife a choice: to leave with him back to America or to stay with his family in Britain, a family she has more affinity with than her own. In so doing, Pinter implies that she would be replacing the void left by Max’s wife, while ironically creating a void in her own immediate family by leaving her three young sons motherless in the US.

The cyclicity of this event is marked by the fact that her husband’s family’s working-class yearnings are already base enough – the horror of what might happen to her own children’s middle-class yearnings is not to be imagined. And indeed we are left wondering what the outcome of this might be.

Willis’s excellent performance as Max, the leader of the almost animalistic, love-starved group of men, matches Abela Garrett’s well – and succumbs to her female presence the last of all – with his two fawning sons and his brother apparently suffering an infarction, all kneeling to the bethroned Ruth. Max beseechingly ends the play with the words: “Kiss me!”

For all the destabilisation of power and the degeneration of a formal visit into a hotbed of sexual politics, The Homecoming made for a very stimulating evening.