The title of Harold Pinter's 1965 classic refers to Teddy who, after years of absence, visits his modest childhood home where his father Max and brothers Lenny and Joey still live. But what comes across in Jamie Lloyd's flashy, 50th-anniversary revival of the play is somewhat of a revelation. This is not just Teddy's homecoming, it's his wife Ruth's too.

She's played here by the excellent Gemma Chan, who beautifully captures Ruth's transition from prey to predator. Pinter, it could be argued, was writing lazily when he wrote Ruth. When we first see her tip-toeing into the house with Teddy she's a nervous waif. Then she's a femme fatale of male fantasy proportions, which still leaves one question unanswered: why on earth a woman would insert herself into the lair of men intent on exploiting her?

But in the moment when she tells her father-in-law that she is from "round here", a new penny drops, partly because of Chan's Oriental looks but also because of the way the actor modulates her accent from posh English to East End cockney. In fact, Lloyd's entire vision could be set in the living room of the Kray brothers, or a family like them. Everything that Pinter intriguingly implies is made explicit here. For instance, the feyness with which Keith Allen plays Sam, makes sense of why Max's brother never married. Ron Cook, as Max, is brimful of malice; John Simm, as Lenny, oozes psychopathic intent, and Gary Kemp, as the returning Teddy, superbly sheds the civility he adopted since leaving the house for a life as an academic, slipping with ease back into the thug that he used to be.

Too obvious? I'd say not. This is a bold reading of everything that Pinter suggests between the lines.