Yeats’s words ‘the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor’ sum up for me Pinter’s The Homecoming. Max and two of his sons (Lenny and Joey) are all bestial, but it is perhaps Max who is the most bestial. I think of him as a Cyclops, as a shambling bear, as limping, cuckolded Hephaestos busy at his forge. In Max’s case, his forge used to be the butcher’s shop, where he used ‘the chopper and the slab’, but now it is the kitchen, where he cooks and which he finds ‘nice’ and ‘cosy’. Traditionally, the kitchen is the woman’s room, but Max seems fairly willing to take on the role of mother, even to the extent of declaring that he has given birth to three grown men, ‘All on my own bat!’, and that he has suffered the pains of giving birth and still feels the pangs.


He is a character who takes the actor out of his comfort zone – or at least he takes me out of mine. At his heart (as at the heart of forge and kitchen) there is an incandescence which continually erupts; he is consumed with rage, he is cunning, self-pitying, dishonest, insolent, fearful, lecherous (though I suspect he is sexually impotent, and always has been) and a cruel bully. But he loves his youngest son, Joey. The problem for the actor (or at least my problem) is to get away from one’s intellect and its civilised defences, so that this beast, with its rage, can emerge through one’s body and one’s voice. Which brings on another problem: merely ranting is no good; one has, paradoxically, to have more control rather than less for a part like this – which means, among other things doing singer’s exercises for an hour a day (if I have the time) and exploring the physical qualities of the words Pinter gives Max. It also means days of depression when nothing seems to go right, and sometimes whole days and nights of panic… Why the devil did I listen to the blandishments of Walter Roberts, why did I agree to do this, why…?
But as well as being a deeply shocking play (one woman acquaintance of mine had nightmares for two consecutive nights after reading it and woke up screaming), it is a wonderful play, with a wicked humour, an acute sensitivity to patterns of speech and a biting analysis of male misogyny. In the end it is the woman who wins: Joey gets his mother, and Max is left with ashes.