Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #174631 in Books
• Published on: 1994-01-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

About what we fear deep down
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.

Whorecoming


At 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.

Pinter and the Theater of the Absurd
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.
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