Pinter's work draws directly from life in its ambiguity, dysfunction, farce and menace. The crudity and bullying endemic to the all-male "large house in north London" menage which is the setting for Pinter's "the Homecoming" is neither artificial nor hyperbolic. Out of public view, ordinary people say and do disagreeable and even appalling things all the time, not least in their unvarnished racism and sexism, and in the unkindness and hostility which becomes a reflex among small groups yoked together in intimate unhappiness. Pinter portrays these truths with an unblinking eye; but art is not mere replication, and Pinter is an artist. The difference is made by the extraordinary human twist at the end, after a skilfully managed intensification of moral horrors which seem to be leading in quite another direction.
    The story is deceptively simple. A retired butcher of choleric mien lives with his brother and two of his three sons in a large north London house. As events unfold in characteristic Pinteresque fashion it becomes plain that this ill-assorted male-only family suffers a deeply odd dysfunctionality – but an entirely believable one. The butcher is Max, a widower, whose venomous hatred for his deceased wife is matched by the tender regard for her nourished by his mild-mannered brother, a chauffeur. Then, late one night as the family sleeps, Max's oldest son Teddy turns up, accompanied by his attractive wife (she used to be model of an ambiguous sort) whose existence is not yet known to the rest of the family. The couple are en route from Venice, where they have been holidaying, to America, where their three sons await them. Teddy has been successful in America, earning a PhD and becoming a college professor of philosophy. His wife Ruth is also English, but they met in America – which, as it transpires, she dislikes, although Teddy loves it – its cleanliness, and the swimming pool at home.
    Interpretations of The Homecoming abound. The most common is to see it as the tale of a struggle for power, unexpectedly won by the stranger and incomer Ruth. A better view is that it is a tale of an uneasy and bitter balance of power kept by the various strategies of the harmed, lamed, wretched domestic arrangement of the four men in the house – Max by bullying, Lenny by stealth, Max's brother by passive aggression, and the youngest son, who is keen on boxing, by unintelligent absorption in his sport so that he is exempt from confronting the others directly. Teddy, the philosopher, has long since escaped; but he is brought back by misplaced nostalgia.
    Into this counter-Eden he brings a counter-Eve, an Eve turned serpent; a wise and knowing serpent, infinitely more powerful than the denizens of the garden. Ruth too is odd – there are hints of something broken in her past: her mind, or morals – but the defective, fractured nature of the household stirs something in her, and step by step she enters its entrails. At first it seems as if she is a disturbed nymphomaniac, giving herself without scruple or thought to her husband's younger brothers, indifferent to what her husband or anyone thinks – but Teddy seems anyway not to mind, as if he knows that she is not to be judged by ordinary standards. 
    Max and his two younger sons decide to keep Ruth. Lenny, it transpires, is a pimp, and he suggests that she pay her way by prostituting herself in the West End. They all gleefully agree. When they explain the plan to Ruth she not only concurs but drives a hard bargain about the flat they will provide for the work, and other amenities. And then suddenly it becomes clear that she has mastered them. Their need for a woman, for the feminine principle to be central in their lives, for her presence and what it yields, has captured them utterly. After the sleaze and unpleasantness of the conversation in which the men plan to put Ruth on the game by night while she cleans and cooks and services their own sexual needs by day, the revelation of female power and the abjection of male need for it could not be more complete.
    The performances are peerless throughout – for which as much praise must go to Robin Lefevre's direction as to the marvellous skills of the cast. Ian Holm knows this play well; he was once Lenny, and now he brings to his version of Max the precise degree of power, crudity, savagery, weakness, age, malice and need that Pinter's text requires. Lia Williams is an utterly beguiling Ruth, in looks and manner perfect for the part. Together the cast and Pinter make a gripping night's theatre, which lives in the mind long afterwards.
AC Grayling