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.
THE HOMECOMINGThe Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St.; (212) 239-6200.