Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming provoked walkouts when Peter Hall staged its world premiere in the Cardiff of 1964 – I know, I was there, I had people stumbling past me bleating in druidical dismay – and it is one of the few plays that, so far from ossifying into a nice, safe classic, has retained its ability to shock.

It is a zoologist’s report from the North London badlands, where life is a barely disguised battle for power and sexual supremacy. What happens when a long-absent male returns to the herd with the sleek young female who is technically his wife?

She is stolen by his father and brothers, rough men she clearly finds more congenial than her mate. He returns to America where he teaches philosophy at a western university while she prepares to replace the family’s dead mother and work as a part-time Soho prostitute.

Michael Attenborough’s revival does full justice to the play’s below-the-belt observation and flyblown wit. As often in all-male households everyone is getting on everyone else’s nerves, often to hilarious effect. But what is disturbing in the play isn’t neglected.

The Homecoming demystifies the family, redefining it as loveless and voracious, and demystifies women as they are perhaps unfairly represented by Ruth, who has clearly come to regard everyday life on husband Teddy’s “stimulating” campus as arid and deadly.

I’ve seen slinkier, sexually more needy Ruths than Jenny Jules but none who exuded such cool disdain. She pushes away Neil Dudgeon’s Teddy in disbelief when he reachs out to her. She is unperturbed by his brother, Nigel Lindsay’s Lenny when he tries to impress her with lurid stories of his life as a hard-man pimp. She is unshockable and aloof and her aloofness is her strength. Watch her at the end: the queen of the hive, half-smiling as even the paterfamilias, Kenneth Cranham’s Max, crawls her way.

Cranham is, simply, terrific. Not that there are problems elsewhere. Lenny radiates knowing contempt. Anthony O’Donnell’s Sam, Max’s brother and the only conventional character on offer, bustles about in a flowery apron mustering what prim self-esteem he can.

But Cranham is the most fearsome Max I have seen. His walking stick is more like a club, which is as it should be, for he can still boom and bluster, still turn red and mottled with rage, still denounce the family as “one flow of stinking pus after another”. He was once a master butcher and, though less the master now, very much the butcher when, for instance, he threatens to chop off the insolent Lenny’s spine.

There is a moment when Max offers Teddy a hug. The professor moves not into cuddle-mode but into a sort of wrestler’s crouch. Will the promised hug come from a father or some murderous sumo? This time, the former – but, as often at last night’s opening, the tension and danger were there.

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