It was an attempt to capture the spontaneity of theatre audiences, allowing only a select few to truly experience the work, although luckily, some of the prints escaped their final intentions.

Set in a North London terrace The Homecoming centres on the suffocating relationship of tyrannical father Max (Paul Rogers), his sons Lenny (Ian Holm) and Joey (Terrence Rigby) and his brother Sam (Cyril Cusack). The rancorous family unit is temporarily wrong footed with the arrival of eldest son Teddy (Michael Jayston), visiting from America with his wife Ruth (Vivien Merchant). As smoldering grudges and hostilities violently erupt, the family's past dysfunctions emerge kicking and screaming into the present, heightened by the specter of their dead mother.

Peter Hall took great care to preserve the ambiance of the original production. The Aldwych set was described by Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer as "...in monotone greys, the colours of mashed newspapers and cigarette ash and old socks" and so it remains here. Hall's wonderfully unobtrusive direction beholds the true nastiness of the situation, executed by every member of this superb cast with dynamite impact.

Not without its gallows humour, derived from the barrage of outrageous insults, the overall effect is compulsively bleak, as described at the time by Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times, "The pauses are pregnant with doubt, fear, triumph, pain, retreat and nasty calculation. The words they employ are either banalities or the acid-tipped darts of family warfare. Each man seems unable to keep his own identity without shredding the egos of all the others in the house…The homecoming shakes up the pecking order and sets off a new scramble for places."

Beware the sensitive, this is Pinter at his best.

Clare Norton-Smith

Pinter at the BBC homepage