NOBEL Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter is one of Britain’s
finest contemporary playwrights and The Homecoming
is one of his
finest plays.
Written in 1964 the action centres on the suffocating relationships
within one
north London family. Tyrannical father Max spends a large part of the
first act
railing against life’s disappointments. His physical powers of
intimidation
may be declining but he makes up for this by baiting his relatives with a
stream of insults and acid put-downs.
His middle son, the vicious and pitiless Lenny, can give as good as he
gets
while younger son Joey, an aspiring boxer, is too dense to be wounded
deeply. Only brother Sam is sensitive to the onslaught. This
dysfunctional
family, who both hate and need each other in equal measure, are
temporarily
disrupted by the arrival of eldest son Teddy, back from America after an
interval of nine years, and his wife Ruth.
The inhabitants of the house soon hatch a plan to use her sexually and
surprisingly, the chilly Ruth agrees while an impassive Teddy looks on.
Typically, Pinter leaves the characters’ motivations unexplained. Is
Lenny a
pimp? Is Sam homosexual? Was Ruth a prostitute and did she know the
men
before she left for America? All these things are possible yet never
certain in a
play that is both naturalistic – the language is steeped in the East End
and full
of pregnant pauses – and surreal as events taking a shocking turn. Yet
the
script is not without a black humour.
Peter Hall, who directed the first production in 1965, later made a film
adaptation for the American Film Theatre in 1973, which captures the
bleak
brutality of the
drama.
Barbaric yet compelling, the casual cruelty of the everyday and the
savage
jungle of family life have rarely been so savagely exposed.