Le retour at Teatro Strehler

An exceptional cast, for this staging of Pinter's text.Luc Bondy, new artistic director of the Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, masters of the European scene, chooses the big names of international film and theatre.
To reread it today, half a century after the debut of The Homecoming (1965), and less than a decade by Nobel Laureate, Harold Pinter, his stature, his originality take on a new importance. Pinter tells the story of Teddy that riapproda in the lap of the family bringing with him his wife, Ruth, married unbeknownst to everyone shortly before leaving for America, and mother of his three sons were overseas. Some years have passed. Teddy is now a successful Professor of philosophy. At home, he finds his father Max ex-butcher, Uncle Sam as a taxi driver and two younger brothers Lenny and Joey. The presence of Ruth, the abode of men, changing the balance: Teddy returns alone to America ... The homecoming opens on the silence of a man who reads the newspaper. Man without qualities, place or nearly so. Banality of a day anything different from others, these initial coordinates of comedy. In just a few scenes, this trompe-l'oeil turns into a painting by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon – "an island of solitude", defines Luc Bondy – and this without any visible element is modified, only in relation to bodies, the words truncated, symbol of repressed violence to southernmost. Because the "return" is also an upheaval: all social roles, professional, family, double, as they commonly are interpreted subverted before our eyes, and tiny steps and abrupt tugging (Pinter's play time is quite inseparable from his vision: building then gushing, is a time of poisonous animal and predator, a snake). Luc Bondy likes these mysterious texts, which skim over and fail, suggesting more than they say.