The Homecoming

Six weeks in Worthing

The play came fast. Pinter wrote it in 1964 at Worthing on the Sussex coast, finished in six weeks, and said afterwards that it kind of wrote itself. That speed is worth holding on to, because nothing about the finished thing reads as improvised: the pauses are placed, the insults land on the beat, and every line of small talk turns out to have been load-bearing.

The Royal Shakespeare Company gave it its first performance at the Aldwych Theatre in London on 3 June 1965, directed by Peter Hall. Paul Rogers played the widowed patriarch Max, Ian Holm his son Lenny, Vivien Merchant the visiting Ruth, Michael Bryant her husband Teddy, John Normington the chauffeur brother Sam and Terence Rigby the boxer Joey. Hall's cast set a template that has proved difficult to shake off — flat delivery, exact timing, menace conducted almost entirely through courtesy.

The situation is simple and the behaviour is not. Teddy, a philosophy professor, returns after six years in America to the North London house he grew up in, bringing a wife his father and brothers have never met. Over two acts the household closes around her, propositions are made in the language of business arrangements, and the play ends with Ruth staying and Teddy flying back alone to his job and his children.

The Broadway ledger

The production transferred to the Music Box Theatre in New York on 5 January 1967, Hall still directing, most of the London cast intact, with Michael Craig taking over as Teddy. It won four Tony Awards that season: Best Play, Best Actor for Rogers, Best Direction for Hall and Best Featured Actor for Holm. That haul is the reason the title still travels on publicity material in countries where Pinter is otherwise a set text rather than a box-office name.

A film followed in 1973, directed by Hall from Pinter's own screenplay and using most of the 1965 company, which preserved the original performances more completely than almost any other Pinter premiere. The play returned to Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 2007 and collected three Tony nominations, confirming a pattern: the work is revived roughly once a decade in the major markets and tends to be taken seriously each time rather than treated as a period curiosity.

Pinter's own line on the material — that there are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false — is quoted by nearly every company that stages it, including the current Melbourne producers. It functions as a warning to directors who want to settle the question of what Ruth is doing and why.

What the revivals keep finding

The most recent major British staging was Matthew Dunster's at the Young Vic, reviewed on 7 December 2023 and running to 27 January 2024, with Jared Harris as Max, Joe Cole as Lenny, Lisa Diveney as Ruth, Robert Emms as Teddy and Nicolas Tennant as Sam. London Theatre gave it three stars and called the play a two-hour provocation that remains as mysterious as ever. The reservation in that notice is instructive: the reviewer found the volume and aggression high enough to trample the silences, singled out Tennant's Sam as the performance of the evening, and noted that Diveney played Ruth through calculated restraint rather than allure.

A British touring production directed by Jamie Glover, designed by Liz Ascroft with lighting by Johanna Town and sound by Max Pappenheim, took the play to Theatre Royal Bath and then Cambridge Arts Theatre, Malvern, Leicester Curve, Theatre Royal Brighton, Newcastle Theatre Royal and Theatre Royal York, with Keith Allen as Max, Mathew Horne as Lenny, Ian Bartholomew as Sam, Sam Alexander as Teddy, Geoffrey Lumb as Joey and Shanaya Rafaat as Ruth.

Smaller companies keep picking it up, and they tend to stage it close. Roustabout Theater's professional ensemble ran it in the Carsten Cabaret at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa to 28 June 2026, directed by Clark Lewis, with the audience on three sides and a set of a couch, chairs, small tables, rugs and a staircase to the bedrooms above. North Bay Stage and Screen described the result as a terrific evening of uncomfortable theatre — which is about as good a summary of the play's working effect as sixty years of criticism has produced.

A company off its own patch

The Melbourne production is presented by the Australian Shakespeare Company, which is an odd and interesting fit. The company was established in 1982 by the British actor-director Neale Warrington with seven co-founders; Glenn Elston began directing Shakespeare Under the Stars in 1987 and joined as artistic director and producer in 1998, building it into Australia's largest independent theatre company on the back of annual outdoor Shakespeare and The Wind in the Willows, which between them have played to more than a million people. Its venues run from the botanic gardens of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to Kakadu National Park, Beswick Falls and Thursday Island, with the Young Bards education programme added in 2010.

Pinter in a 300-seat studio is the opposite of that work in almost every respect: no picnic rugs, no daylight, no children's classic, one room and six people. Greg Carroll directs and has also designed it, following his productions of Swansong and Glory Dazed. Carroll has said the casting was the point — that every actor helps create an ensemble capable of meeting Pinter's extraordinary demands — and has described the company as some of Australia's finest stage performers.

Kate Kendall plays Ruth, Richard Piper is Max, Ben Geurens is Lenny, Peter Houghton is Teddy, David Field is Sam and Eddie Orton is Joey. Hannah Norris is assistant director, with costumes by Amelia Carroll and Margaret Goy and set construction by Shakira Dugan, Julian Machin and John Rochford. The company's own copy relocates the family from the play's North London to East London and describes them as butchers and fighters bound by routine and rivalry.

The sound of it

Sound design is by Paul Norton, whose route to Pinter ran through Australian rock: bass with City in the late 1970s, co-founder of The Runners on Mushroom Records, stints with Wendy and the Rocketts and Steve Hoy and the Hoy Boys, a solo career that produced Stuck On You at number three on the Australian charts in 1989, the band Hillbilly Moon, and a national run with The Countdown Spectacular in 2006. He has since written music direction and original scores for the Australian Shakespeare Company on Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and Alice in Wonderland, and Noise11 confirmed his role on this production on 8 September 2026.

A Pinter sound design is mostly a negotiation with silence — how much room tone sits under a pause, what the street outside is doing while nobody speaks. In a studio of this size that decision is audible from every seat, which is a large part of why companies keep choosing small rooms for a play that won its awards in 1,000-seat houses.