The Homecoming
by Harold Pinter
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Book Summary Information
Author: Harold PinterEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-11
ISBN: 0802151051
Number of pages: 82
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of The Homecoming
Book Review: Pinter and the Theater of the Absurd
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of The Homecoming
In an old and slightly seedy house in North London there lives a family of men: Max, the aging but still aggressive patriarch; his younger, ineffectual brother Sam; and two of Max's three sons, neither of whom is married -- Lenny, a small-time pimp, and Joey, who dreams of success as a boxer. Into this sinister abode comes the eldest son, Teddy, who, having spent the past six years teaching philosophy in America, is now bringinghis wife, Ruth, home to visit the family she has never met. As the play progresses, the younger brothers make increasingly outrageous passes at their sister-in-law until they are practically making love to her in front of her stunned but strangely aloof husband.Anthologies Books
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