After a 10-year hiatus from the theatre, Joe Cole was desperate to return to the stage – so he and his agent made it their mission to find him a play. “It was a closed shop at times,” says Cole, who has starred in hit shows including Gangs of London and Peaky Blinders. “When you haven’t been on stage for a long time, I guess people sometimes don’t really see you in that vein.”
However, Oscar-nominated director Matthew Dunster – the brains behind 2.22 A Ghost Story and Hangmen – was different, offering Cole one of the six roles in a new production of Harold Pinter’s powerful, unnerving play, The Homecoming, at the Young Vic. A contained play, The Homecoming focuses on the return of one character, Teddy, to his London home, bringing with him his wife, Ruth, to meet his father, Max, his brothers, Lenny and Joey, and his Uncle Sam.
Cole takes on the role of Lenny, a pimp. “It’s a far cry from screen acting,” he says. “There is a different set of skills required. But for me [the stage] is where I fell in love with acting, performance and telling stories. It came naturally and felt quite freeing.”
He caught the acting bug when he was still at school (The Hollyfield School in Surbiton) where the drama department would put on plays “which, at the time, exceeded expectations and the budget of what the school had”. He's excited to tap into his original passion for theatre once more with this production.
“Funny, clever and nuanced, The Homecoming is a reflection on society, illustrating what male and female roles represent and the ways in which we are trying to progress,” says Cole. The intense claustrophobia Pinter creates in this play forces the audience to recognise their individual part in the production: we bear witness to the plot (many critics have suggested it is not just a ‘homecoming’ for Teddy on a literal level, but a ‘homecoming’ for Ruth as she discovers her pre-marriage identity) and the intense, close-quartered action.
The confines of the Young Vic are ideal for creating that sense of intimacy – as Cole puts it, “the audience, they can smell us”. Renowned for reimagining classics with soaring success, the Young Vic has been home to so many performances that are forever etched in my memory, including Billie Piper’s Yerma, Vanessa Kirby and Gillian Anderson in A Streetcar Named Desire and Hattie Morahan’s A Doll’s House.
Cole will be on more familiar ground in his upcoming screen productions (horror film The Damned and BBC One drama Nightsleeper). But if the Young Vic’s track record and Cole’s own dedication to the stage are anything to go by, The Homecoming will be very powerful indeed.
Gala Gordon is a contributing editor to Harper's Bazaar, focusing on theatre.
