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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 822.914
EAN num: 9780802151056
ISBN number: 0802151051
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 96
Printing Date: January 11, 1994
Publishing house: Grove Press
Sale Popularity Level: 248320
Studio: Grove Press
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When Teddy, a professor in an American university, brings his wife Ruth to visit London and his family, he finds himself prey to old conflicts. But now it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy. The playwright's other works include 'The Birthday Party' and 'Old Times'.
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Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
At very first this play seems like a good absurd/kitchen sink 60s
English play, with the usual dysfunctional family characters. It
is that but with the character of Ruth, things get really weird-even
for this group of people. They're a pretty perverted bunch, but I still
enjoyed the play. Though Ruth stills seems like something pretty
unexpected, but that's what the theatre is sometimes all about. If
I were Ruth I'd get back to the USA ASAP.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead
Rated by buyers -
Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (Grove, 1965)
I spent the very 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 very first Pinter I read?" Then came act two, and I understood it.
The Homecoming starts off (as you might expect given that very 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 very 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
Rated by buyers -
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.
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