Pinter productions are like buses. You wait ages for one to turn up then lots arrive. Last year comedians had their turn, with Lee Evans in The Dumb Waiter and Bill Bailey doing antique sketches. This year it gets serious. Timothy West and Gina McKee have just opened in a The Lover/The Collection, but it is Kenneth Cranham who faces the biggest challenge, as Max in The Homecoming. The last person to play the foulmouthed patriarch, in a Radio 3 production, was Sir Harold himself.

Luckily Cranham and Pinter have history. “We were in the TV version of The Birthday Party together and after the recording Harold was nowhere to be found. People went looking and eventually found him sitting in the Light Entertainment bar. Harold said ‘that's how I've always seen myself’.”

The garrulous 63-year-old with an anecdote for every occasion has been hooked on the playwright since RADA. “I also played a part that Harold played, called Seeley in A Night Out. My character went over to the office bully and had a conversation about shoes. ‘That's one thing I'll say about you, Gidney. You carry your feet well.’ I used to love saying that line.”

Cranham adores not just the legendary pauses but the words between them. “The plays are modern but have a relish which is like old language, a film noir gangster thing that goes right back to Webster. Dominic Dromgoole called Pinter the aircraft carrier everyone else's plane takes off from and that’s right. I've done Bond, Orton, Caryl Churchill, each of them pares their writing down, but he was the first to do that with naturalistic dialogue. Max is a distillation of London language, a complete contrast to doing Sergeant Rough in Gaslight at the Old Vic last year.”

He learnt his lines in Berlin while filming his part as one of Hitler’s cronies in the forthcoming Tom Cruise movie, Valkyrie. “I was in a geological garden. You could see the strata in the marble and the lines I was dealing with had the same compression, the same density.”

In a career spanning forty years Cranham has excelled at villains and victims. He made his name as the eponymous star of light-hearted eighties East End series Shine On Harvey Moon and played his share of heavies in films such as Layer Cake. Max, the old man in an all-male household tackling the arrival of his son’s new wife, is the meatiest of roles: “I'm the bulliest bully there's ever been. God I'm so versatile!” The family in Michael Attenborough's production could not be further from the loveable Moons if they lived in Tierra Del Fuego.

It helped that he could go to Pinter for pointers. “He's the perfect source. We had lunch and he told me he wanted me to play Max. When you know that it is rather encouraging.” His advice is as concise as his text. “When I was Aston in The Caretaker he told me at the beginning of the play Aston hasn't spoken to anyone for ten years and at the end he's not going to speak for another twenty. That's a hell of a note.”

For Cranham a role is never set in stone. “When Aston ended I nearly asked my agent to find me another production. It’s like sculpting, you return to a task and it never gets less interesting.” It is this passion for perfection that enabled him to star in Stephen Daldry’s gong-bagging An Inspector Calls for 800 performances here and on Broadway. “What An Inspector Calls and The Homecoming have in common is the sheer force of language.”

While Pinter likes productions to stick to the script there are some changes. “Homecoming was written during the time of the Lord Chamberlain so there was no swearing, but some has been put in because that's what he would have liked to have said – ‘When the firm gets rid of you you can flake off’ is changed to ‘...fuck off’.” But it is always clear who the boss is. “I wanted to say ‘...fuck off out of it’ and he wasn't having it - he knows just how far to go.” He breaks into Max’s bilious description of his good-for-nothing sons: "one flow of stinking pus after another."

The Homecoming is clearly as potent today as it was when it premiered in 1965. There is also an acclaimed production currently on Broadway, starring Ian McShane as Max. Not surprisingly Cranham has a couple of stories about McShane. “He was in the first Loot with Kenneth Williams and I was in the second. It was mine that took off. How could you believe in Kenneth Williams beating someone up? He couldn’t hit you with a haddock. I did Lovejoy once. Ian had a big yacht, the guests had tiny caravans. Dudley Sutton pointed to one then the other and said “Winnebago - Loserbago.”

The Homecoming is previewing at The Almeida, London, N1 (020 7359 4404) and opens on February 7 .

www.almeida.co.uk

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