Massimo Popolizio direct and performs in The Homecoming, the celebrated work by Harold Pinter from 1964, a true “portrait of a family at home”. The members include the father Max – performed by Massimo Popolizio himself – an ex-butcher and horse-race enthusiast, his brother Sam, who drives a taxi that is not his property and who is constantly defined by Max as a leach, Max’s children Lenny, a thirty-year ex-pimp and liar who boasts of violent erotic adventures, and Joey, an aspiring professional boxer who is in reality the most fragile of them all. 
The precarious family equilibrium is upset by the arrival one evening of another son, Teddy, an established philosophy professor returning from the United States after six years with his enigmatic wife Ruth, mother of their three children, to introduce her to his relatives. The only female figure in a male setting, Ruth stirs desire and sets in motion conflict, allowing her apparent fragility to evolve into a strategy for control and power. The events that unfold will overturn the already delicate balance of this community. 
With a text that carries traits of a screenplay, Massimo Popolizio translates the cynicism, cruelty and humour of Pinter – which reaches its peak here – in a “dangerously” entertaining play. Shifting between humour and tragedy, it uncovers the psychological tension of Pinter’s writing, which exposes the unsettling truth of human nature and the power dynamics that lie within a family.

The play contains explicit language