BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN? | March 12th 2008

Odegaard

With "The Homecoming" now on in both London and New York, audiences are getting a good dose of Harold Pinter's sadistic surrealism, writes Molly Flatt. But the play's absurd take on family may be the purest way to capture emotional truths on stage ...

Of the many adjectives we use to describe theatre, "surreal" is London's meaningless mot du jour. Nowadays it is used to indicate a vague kind of delightful originality, a jolly sister to the "experimental" and "avant-garde"--two parts louche 1920s intellectualism to one part hard-hitting 1960s liberalism. We saw last year's "Surreal Things" at the V&A and Dali at the Tate Modern. We loved that clay thing at the Mime festival and David Haig going nuts in "The Sea".

We associate surreality with insouciance, with artists being naughty and having fun. But there is a very different, painful surrealism in Michael Attenborough's new interpretation of "The Homecoming", now on at the Almeida Theatre (and also on Broadway). I found the experience of watching Harold Pinter's controversial masterpiece uncomfortable. It starts so well: a darkly funny and recognisable portrait of 1970s masculinity, with a petty, petulant north London patriarch named Max bullying his two sons--sinister Lenny and bouncing boxer Joey--as well as his fussy chauffeur brother Sam. All of it takes place in the confines of their bleak front room. Then the prodigal son Teddy returns with his wife Ruth, and the action devolves from awkward to disconcertingly bizarre.

A dim, bleak horror infuses the naturalistic setting and dialogue, reminiscent of the theatre of the absurd. The impact of "The Homecoming" depends on actors who seem believable-even sympathetic--as they do and say bizarre things. This production succeeds brilliantly. Kenneth Cranham (Max) and Nigel Lindsay (Lenny) are especially good at lending inner integrity to emotional extremes. Their nuanced performances challenge viewers to accept their revolting behaviour as utterly natural. They curdle their speech with a sly ludicrousness.

In his provocative Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mr Pinter spoke about the challenge of exploring reality through art, of capturing truth in drama.

More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

He makes a good case for the idea that surrealism is the most emotionally true art form. It is by capturing what is great and wacky and wrong and sincere that we understand what is human.

I'm not suggesting that theatre has to be painful to be good. But the rhythmic words of "The Homecoming"--which trap, surprise and refuse to let go--make a strange, discordant music. It is the sound of a reality we'd rather not acknowledge.

(Molly Flatt is a writer based in London who blogs about the arts at the Guardian and at http://hitchcock-blonde.com/.)