The Homecoming Unravels Into A Dark Power Game In Melbourne

Harold Pinter’s 1964 play remains confronting more than 60 years after its creation, with an experienced Australian cast bringing its uneasy examination of power, misogyny, manipulation and family rivalry to Athenaeum Theatre 2.

by Paul Cashmere

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming is playing at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre 2 until October 3, and what begins as an uneasy family reunion develops into something considerably darker, with Act 2 taking the audience into territory that can still shock more than six decades after the play was written.

Directed and designed by Greg Carroll, the Australian Shakespeare Company production brings together Kate Kendall as Ruth, Richard Piper as Max, Ben Geurens as Lenny, Peter Houghton as Teddy, David Field as Sam and Eddie Orton as Joey.

The cast brings decades of stage and screen experience to a work that depends heavily on rhythm, silence and the shifting balance of power between its characters. Rather than attempting to soften Pinter’s more confronting material, the production allows the play’s discomfort to develop at its own pace.

The Homecoming premiered in London in 1965, having been written the previous year, at a time when attitudes towards sex, marriage and gender roles were undergoing major change. Pinter’s story placed those tensions inside a North London household occupied by men whose relationships are defined by rivalry, resentment and an almost ritualised competition for control.

More than 60 years later, the language and social assumptions can feel firmly rooted in another era, yet the central questions remain difficult to dismiss.

Teddy, a philosophy professor who has lived in America for six years, returns to his family home with his wife Ruth. His father Max, brothers Lenny and Joey, and uncle Sam have never met her. Teddy expects a homecoming. Instead, Ruth becomes the catalyst for a struggle that exposes the fragile hierarchy holding the household together.

Richard Piper gives Max the force of a patriarch who has spent years establishing his authority, while Ben Geurens’ Lenny operates through provocation, manipulation and calculated uncertainty. Peter Houghton’s Teddy carries the detachment of a man who has built an intellectual life away from his family, while Eddie Orton gives Joey the physical presence of a boxer in training.

David Field’s Sam provides another dimension to the household, quietly observing the behaviour around him while remaining caught within its hierarchy.

At the centre is Kate Kendall’s Ruth, the only woman physically present in the play. The dead mother, Jessie, nevertheless hangs over the family through the men’s memories and stories, creating an absence that becomes almost as significant as any character on stage.

Ruth changes that dynamic.

What makes The Homecoming particularly unsettling is the way Pinter allows the men to reveal themselves through ordinary conversation. Arguments, memories, insults and boasts gradually expose attitudes towards women, masculinity, sex and ownership. The characters frequently say one thing while meaning something else, leaving the audience to work through the gaps.

The play was provocative when it premiered and its treatment of misogyny, sexism and the manipulation of women remains central to its impact. The production does not need to impose a contemporary interpretation because Pinter’s writing supplies the tension itself.

The first act establishes the family and its fault lines. The second takes those tensions somewhere else entirely.

Without giving away the turn that awaits the audience, Act 2 fundamentally changes the balance of power. What appears to be a story about Teddy bringing his wife home gradually becomes a far more complicated examination of who has control, who is being manipulated and who understands the situation most clearly.

The result is a dark, increasingly surreal drama in which the audience is repeatedly forced to reassess what it has just witnessed.

Carroll’s production uses a confined, darkly detailed interior to reinforce the sense of a household that has become trapped inside its own history. Sound is by Australian rock musician and songwriter Paul Norton, whose previous theatre work includes Much Ado About Nothing and a number of Australian Shakespeare Company productions.

Norton was previously profiled by Noise11 in connection with The Homecoming, documenting the unusual move from his career with The Runners, Wendy and the Rocketts and his solo recordings into theatre sound and musical direction.

The Homecoming remains at Athenaeum Theatre 2, 188 Collins Street, Melbourne, until October 3, 2026. For audiences unfamiliar with Pinter, it offers a particularly revealing introduction to the playwright’s use of silence, ambiguity and psychological power. For those who know the work, the performances provide another opportunity to discover just how uncomfortable the play can still become.