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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Family Reunion to Avoid,
By "umd_cyberpunk" (MA, United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Homecoming (Paperback)
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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It creeps up on you, it does.,
By
This review is from: The Homecoming (Paperback)
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
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
About what we fear deep down,
By Sirin (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Homecoming (Paperback)
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.
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