Outline

Introduction: It provides a brief introduction about the play.

Analysis: In this part is is discussed that, the story concerns the events which transpire when a cultured academic, the eldest brother in a family of three, returns from the United States to visit his family and introduce them to his wife of six years.

Conclusion: in conclusion it is concluded that This theme of atavism is an important one in the play, and it is effectively highlighted in this production.

The Homecoming

Introduction

This is one of Harold Pinter's greatest plays, and one of his most disturbing. No, shocking, even ugly. Its world is claustrophobic, dark, dangerous. Like most of Pinter's work, it's about power: who holds it, who thinks he holds it, who wants it, who fears it, who suffers under it. Everyone has a wound, a grievance, a secret. This is the blackest family play ever written: it makes Strindberg and Albee look almost comfortable. Kenneth Cranham is Max, the deposed paterfamilias who has probably never ruled, a King Lear of the Holloway Road, carrying his stick like a broken sceptre. This is a magnificently hideous performance, a masterclass in impotent brutality. Jenny Jules is Ruth, Queen of the Night, with the promise of a mother and the greed of a whore. Michael Attenborough's production has a sinister calm, which gives the sense of lurking terror that beats in every line of the text.

Analysis

Harold Pinter's The Homecoming derives much of its impact from its calculated assault on the viewer's normal expectations about family life. Pinter's lower-class English family is in no usual sense a family. Instead of a home, the house is a cage in which the inmates snarl and scratch at one another; life there is a community of vituperation. In what obviously passes for everyday discourse, Max, the family patriarch, describes his dead wife as having a "rotten stinking face," himself as a "lousy filthy father," his brother as a "tit" and a "maggot," his daughter-in-law as a "pox-ridden slut," and her husband as "stinkpig." The epithets are returned in kind by the family.

The dramatic situation of the play is the return of the eldest son, Teddy, from America, where in six years he has married, had three children, and established himself as a professor of philosophy in a university. His welcome home is exactly what the viewer has by now been led to expect: an explosion of insult. And the major event of the play is a fitting conclusion to all this gemutlichkeit: In the second and final act, after Teddy's wife willingly has sex with Joey, the aspiring-boxer son, in front of the family (including her husband, who stands passively by), she is invited by the father and brothers to remain when her husband returns to America (Lahr 76-77). She will sleep with them, and to earn her way she will prostitute herself several hours a night in an establishment that the other son, Lenny, a pimp, will set up for her. She bargains briefly for a ...