Customer Reviews

The Homecoming

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Pinter at his darkest and most experimental.

This play's first and second acts are of equal length down to the line.

Sexual deviance, abuse, name calling, assault and torture: these are the norm. These people make the rest of our families seem pretty good. The play is twisted and as much a psychological journey as anything else.

Pinter lives up the claim that his plays were like, "Beckett in doors," with this one. Though most of Pinter's plays have a dark edge to them, this one may even cross over the line, if you are paying close attention to what is really going on.

Worth reading at least twice, after the shock from the first time through, the second read (if read closely), becomes even darker and more forbidding.

Wonderfully written, and further proof that Pinter is one of the masters of modern British drama.

Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (Grove, 1965)

I spent the first act of this effort from our most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature thinking "my, this is all well and good, but what is it about this play that had everyone telling me this needs to be the first Pinter I read?" Then came act two, and I understood it.

The Homecoming starts off (as you might expect given that first paragraph) unassumingly enough; a man and his wife of six years return to his ancestral home. His brothers, uncle, and father live there, and are meeting his wife for the first time; the brothers, roustabouts both of them, act a bit oddly (well, actually, a bit naturally) around the wife at first, but there's nothing terribly out of the ordinary. In fact, there's a surprising lack of family tension; the normally prickly father welcomes his wayward son home with open arms.

Then, of course, everything goes to pot in the most entertaining manner possible. I have spent years reading thousands of volumes wondering why it is that everyone has to over-emote; The Homecoming is the absolute, perfect antithesis, and I spent the entire second act wishing that these characters inhabited at least half the novels I've read in the past decade. They're deliciously perverse, and so very deadpan about it. Now, while Pinter is busy creating these characters and putting them into interesting situations (and the situations are interesting enough that the entire play can take place in a single room), he's offering some excellent satire on the family dynamic, but Pinter is talented enough to let the satire speak for itself while he concentrates on the story at hand, the mark of a man who knows how to write.

This is very good stuff, and I'll definitely be diving farther into Pinter in the coming years. *** ½

The homecoming has been described as a Jewish family play, though this is a little patronising for it illuminates single truths. The action takes place in a single room. It is tense, taught, claustrophobic in the extreme. Teddy, a successful academic and his beautiful wife return to his family home in North London, a male only household. His brothers have not achieved as he has, instead they operate on the murky fringes of working class society. Lenny, in particular is a sly and dangerous man. He is well aware of the unspoken masculine power dynamics at play, and pulls the strings with devious and malevolent effect. The play becomes tighter and tenser as the action progresses. Eventually, rips occur - tears in the fabric of the surface of close family life. Surreal and astonishing things happen. Characters behave according to their true natures. Personalities are laid bare in their essence. Pinter shows us what we fear deep down in our relations with others, but are afraid to face head on.

5 stars going on 10. It will take me weeks to digest this one. Little bit of a surprise, eh? So Pinter is not just a political campaigner.

The quality of the dialogue knocked me off my feet. Conventions seem well-established but aren't quite the expected conventions. The family is close but not quite the expected closeness. This is hardly a dysfunctional family: it's just a family not functioning as you might have been taught a family should.

I recently watched the 1973 American Film Theatre performance of this play on VHS. Vivian Merchant, who also starred in the American Film Theatre's version of Jean Genet's "The Maids", plays Ruth in "The Homecoming". How to expect a better cast? In the hands of those incredible actors, this play slammed into me. It will take me days to find suitable words to describe what hit me. Unlike the plays of Pinter's friend Beckett, "The Homecoming" can't be dismissed as Theatre of the Absurd. Not that there isn't absurdity, but that Pinter works hard to interwine it with familiar daily routines.

No boring moments. At the beginning the hostilities seemeed contrived but very soon a lot more was going on. Most of us aren't as creative as this family in finding a way to make the family work ... and most of us probably wouldn't want to be. But they are close and not just because of what they share during this visit. The father especially struck me as rising above his angers to find a love (however unconventional) for his sons and that warmth became unmistakeable as the play progressed. No? Well, something special is going on in "The Homecoming" and I'll probably need many passes to understand what it is. But, with such rich dialogue, many passes seem warranted.

This is my first Pinter play, but it won't be my last. However, I can't give it an entirely favourable review. In my mind, I keep comparing to the masterpieces of family disfunction on stage, particularly Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and Osborne's Look Back in Anger.

Pinter is a playwright in complete control of style. The diction and dialogue of his characters, the pauses (including the infamous PINTER pause), and the specificity of the characters make him a playwright one should definetly read and ponder. However, I doubt the Homecoming can be considered his best play, or I would seriously wonder about the reputation that he was given.

The Homecoming is undermined by the that Pinter doesn't want us to sympathize with these characters. A good playwright can make that a plus, but instead, Pinter also doesn't allow us to understand them. The characters are either aloof or loathsome. In the end, the plays biggest fault is it's lack of motion. No one changes, no one moves forward, there's really no motivation to finish the play.

Pinter strongly resented reviewers who stressed the Jewish setting of the play, but its credibility depends on a reader realizing that the family described is not at all an absurdist fantasy, or a mockery of English domesticity, but a closely knit immigrant family, whose members are totally dependent on each other and quite unable to break the family bond and establish themselves successfully and independently in the larger society around them. Terry (one of the sons/brothers) claims to have done so, by going off to teach at an American university and starting his own family, but an attentive reader will realize that this is a fiction. He claims to be a brilliant philosophy professor with three sons: but the 'three sons' are simply a claim to have equalled his father, and when one of his brothers tries to engage him in a philosophical discussion, he backs away. When he returns home with a glamorous wife (or is she really his wife?) from a totally different background, his family react with a mixture of hostility and admiration. They attempt to take possession of her; she responds by manipulating them. It is quite unclear at the end who will be the ultimate victor -- which is why the feminist reading is too pat. Pinter takes great trouble to avoid giving his readers any clue as to how they are to judge either the characters or the action. The result is a deeply disturbing play, open to many interpretations, and one of the masterpieces of modern British literature.

"The Homecoming" was labeled by one early critic as a "comedy of menace", and I feel that sums it up better than anything else I have heard. This is a dark, deeply ambiguous, and funny play. I first read this play in college, and then again recently, soon after seeing an excellent production of it at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario Canada staring Brian Dennehy. Being older and more experienced, I feel much better about the play then I did when I first encountered it years ago.
I am hesitant to say what the play is about, because even after seeing a very good production, and reading the text closely, there are a myriad of possibilities about how to interpret the script, and the nuances therein. The play certainly is about family relationships, sexual jealousy, gender power dynamics, and many other things to boot. And yet, Pinter never gives us an insight into what he really thinks about these things, and at times I am not even sure the characters do. And it works!
A strength of the play are the characters Max and Lenny. In Lenny especially Pinter has created a daunting and very intriguing character that can make the audience squirm in their seats. He is dark, funny, smart, and a pimp. A wonderful role for a talented performer to sink his teeth into. In fact, all of the roles have wonderful possibilities in performance.
However, the greatest power in the play lies not in what is said, but rather in what is NOT said. It is there that the reader is stimulated into following up on hints in the text, and making up most of the story for themselves in their head. The infamous "Pinter pause" is certainly on display in this work. I can imagine many interesting conversations to be had while arguing about what the play is really saying.
Some readers hate that ambiguity, I love it. It is a personal preference so be warned, if you pick up "The Homecoming" you will be left with more questions than answers.

I agree that this play could be viewed at totally crazy, but it's supposed to. I really loved this play. I think Pinter has an excellent way of making us step back, and be disgusted and enjoy a show at the same time.

It's not supposed to have a beginning, middle, or an end. It is more like real life than realism is. It's not a life full of 'Drama,'it's more like real life, only we can find it funny because it's not happening to us.

Read Pinter with an open mind, and a sense of humor. Try not to take him litererally, but read the subtext.

This Harold Pinter play belongs to the theater of the absurd tradition. It does not seek to portray life as it is authentically or realistically but gives us a view of life through a crazed mirror image. It is life seen as an absurd concoction in which desire is realized and the abnormal replaces the normal. The setting is deceiving: a realistic seedy London living room, but the family who dwell therein veer off the track into the world of the absurd.
We get to know a great deal about the pasts of these characters: an old man, his brother Sam, his three grown sons, and the wife of one of the sons. She and her husband are visiting from America where he is a philosophy professor. They have left their three little sons at home. We see a large slice of the ordinary lives of these six people. But people in real life don't act this way, theatergoers say. Of course they don't. Why go to the theater to see the commonplace, the ordinary? Why not see what would happen when libidos take over?
I saw an insightful production of this play on Broadway on January12, 2008. It featured Ian McShane as Max, the nasty father, Raul Esparza as Lenny, the pimp. Eve Best played the enigmatic sexual tease Ruth, and three other fine actors rounded out the cast. The play was full of menace, irony, and shock, but with many bits that drew laughter. The father and his two stay-at-home sons have a low opinion of women, and Ruth certainly reinforces that view. Lenny talks about his violence toward women. Teddy, the philosophy teacher, an ersatz intellectual, acquiesces to his wife staying with the family as a tart stoically and unfeelingly.
The father knows his sons' and his brother's weaknesses, and he cruelly exploits them. Everything seems sinister and threatening. Lenny blows his stack over trivial matters: his brother Teddy has deliberately eaten the cheese sandwich he was saving for himself while Teddy blithely accepts that his wife is deserting him and staying with his family to become a hooker. The trivial becomes earthshaking, and crucial matters become trivial. She does not do what a real person would do, but what a woman might do if she let her deeper, darker nature take over. The father's brother Sam ineffectual and impotent. Early on Max says to Same that he should get married and bring his wife home to live in the family manse so everyone can "enjoy" her.
The readers or the audience squirm in their seats and don't get it. Since this play was written forty-two years ago, the audiences have lost their understanding of the absurdist traditions and have slipped back into their state of undemanding, timid and risk-free theatergoing. Nobel prize winner Pinter blazed new ground for them, and they are right back where they started from.

Reads like an absurd episode of the old CBS show "My Three Sons"

Sam Shepard shamelessly ripped the plot from this play for his own pulitzer prize winning play "Buried Child".

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll get nervous.

Pinter is the greatest living playwright!

Read him. You'll never use the word "dysfunctional" to describe YOUR family ever again.