The Homecoming, Trafalgar Studio 1, review: Blackly funny take on Pinter's classic in its 50th anniversary year

Jamie Lloyd offers a notably fresh and blackly funny take on Pinter's The Homecoming in its fiftieth anniversary year. His production is irrigated by the sound of the rock and roll music that was on the rise at the time the play made its first, sexually shocking impact. The primal appetites rumbling to be appeased in the competitive, rancid-with-testosterone domestic zoo and the taboos spoiling to be broken are given a slightly camp edge in this staging. There are sci-fi whooshes of red light that frame key moments as if underscoring the crackling tension and marking them out iconic tableaux. Before play proper begins, this light bathes Lenny (excellent John Simm) who poses with a knowing leer by a door so central and ghostly-looking it could be a little pocket of Gothic in this North London butcher's house.

Paradoxically, the fact that its tongue seems to be enigmatically patrolling its cheek allows the production to heighten what's savage and incorrigibly unsettling in the domestic drama about an implicitly Jewish household of men who have lived too long without a woman in their midst. For the first time ever watching this production, I was put in mind of gender-reversed Lorca play. Absolutely unintentionally on the dramatist's part, of course – but it suggests a template against which to savour the scabrous deviant clarity of Pinter's dialogue can be measured in its comic deadliness.

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Arriving in the middle of the night to upset the fetid balance of the home comes one of the sons Teddy (Gary Kemp), who is (somewhat improbably) a lecturer in philosophy in America and his wife Ruth. All the males routinely diminish each other by sexual slights and Ruth's presence hardly improves the situation. Ron Cook is magnificent as the father, Max: in his own eyes a former cock of the walk, now reduced to brandishing his stick from his chair, and casting aspersions on the sexuality of his chauffeur brother (whose ambiguity is, in every sense, neatly handled by Keith Allen, here adroitly cast against type). Cook is a snider Max than usual, a nasal mixture of aggrievedness, aggression and weakness as when he memorialises his own father: “I respected my father not only as a man but as a number one butcher! And to prove it I followed him into the shop. I learned to carve a carcase at his knee. I commemorated his name in blood. I gave birth to three grown men!”

I've seen production of this piece that have felt like porn as Ruth assert dominance over the men's crude misogynistic gambits and consents to stay as a mother-figure who will also go on the game in Soho. But excellent Gemma Chan plays Ruth interestingly not as a self-parodic sex object with a mind of her own but as a woman who powerfully and quietly subordinates the men to her will. It's by no means clear that she will earn her keep through prostitution. Happy 50th anniversary.

To 13 Feb; 0844 871 7632