The Homecoming (1973) - IMDb IMDb Doctor Strange Confirmed to Appear in ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ 14 hours ago There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error In a dreary North London flat, the site of perpetual psychological warfare, a philosophy professor visits his family after a nine-year absence and introduces the four men - father, uncle and two brothers - to his wife. Director: a list of 5062 titles created 17 Jul 2011 a list of 1441 titles created 29 Oct 2011 a list of 5069 titles created 11 Feb 2014 a list of 393 titles created 25 Dec 2014 a list of 661 titles created 24 Jun 2015 Search for " The Homecoming " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below.

You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. Nominated for 1 BAFTA Film Award. See more awards » Photos The Walton family is preparing for Christmas in the early 1930s. It's Christmas eve and they are waiting for father Walton to come home from his job in the city some 50 miles away. Since he... See full summary » Director: Fielder Cook The down-at-heel lodger in a seaside boarding house is menaced by two mysterious strangers, who eventually take him away. Director: William Friedkin An English professor finds his life crumbling around him. Director: Harold Pinter A recent recruit is one of seven soldiers posted to an abandoned farm with little information. Soon a bus full of frightened men arrive and the soldiers are told they are the enemy. Director: Vladimir Perisic Pinter's semi-autobiographical play examining the surprise attraction, shy first steps, gradual flowering, and treasonous deception of a woman's extramarital affair with her husband's best ... See full summary » Director: David Hugh Jones Aston (Robert Shaw), a quiet, reserved man, lives alone in a top-floor cluttered room of a small abandoned house in a poor London district.

He befriends and takes in Mac Davies (Donald ... See full summary » Director: Clive Donner A film adaptation of William Shakespeare's famous play in which four lovers sort out their problems with the help of fairies at midnight in the forest of Athens. Director: Peter Hall The upper-class owner of a gallery, Catherine Lelievre, hires the efficient and quiet maid Sophie to work in the family manor in the French countryside. Her husband Georges Lelievre, who is... See full summary » Director: Claude Chabrol Steve Howard, a British sales executive living in Manchester, England, begins an affair with a young hitchhiker, Elle Patterson, to emotionally get away from his marriage to his wife ... See full summary » Director: Peter Hall 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 7.3/10 X As the young man, Tom, prepares to leave the Suffolk village of his birth, voices and experiences from his family's past crowd in on his mind, weaving a poetic tapestry of the love of home and the longing to get away from it.

Director: Peter Hall Edit Storyline Max is a surly pensioner who alternately venerates and vilifies his dead wife. Sam, his brother, is a supercilious chauffeur. Lenny is a smiling, snake-like pimp. Joey is a thick-witted, would-be boxer. These four men live together in a North London flat, the site of their perpetual sadomasochistic battle of words and sometimes physical violence. And then after nine years, Max's third son, Teddy, a philosophy professor living in California, comes back home for a visit. He brings his wife, Ruth. She is immediately drawn in to the family's ugly psychological games and quickly proves a worthy opponent. Soon, the game involves both of Teddy's brothers taking extreme liberties with Ruth, as the coiled Teddy obstinately refuses to spoil the malicious fun by objecting. Written by J. Spurlin Taglines: The share the house. They share the food. They share Teddy's wife. Such a nice happy family.

Genres: 16 April 1977 (France) See more » Also Known As: Harold Pinter's The Homecoming See more » Company Credits MGM first announced this in 1967, with John Frankenheimer as director. See more » Quotes Teddy : You wouldn't understand my works. You wouldn't have the faintest idea of what they were about. You wouldn't appreciate the points of reference. You're way behind. All of you. There's no point in my sending you my works. You'd be lost. It's nothing to do with the question of intelligence. It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it's a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the ... (United Kingdom) – See all my reviews The scene involving the water glass and its swift reversal of male sexual aggression is perceptively commented upon above. There is also a very strange and ambiguous exchange between Lenny and Ruth in the second act, which is, in this filmed version of the original production, played and photographed with extreme sensitivity.

Indeed, it would be very challenging to convey its poetry in anything except the most intimate theatre. This is the dialogue beginning with an uncharacteristically polite conversation between the two characters, ostensibly about clothes. At the start, the room has darkened slowly around the two seated and silent figures, possibly indicating a significant lapse of time. The ensuing dialogue is thus imbued with a quality of a dream and the strangeness of Ruth's monologue "Once or twice we went to a place in the country...." is given a heightened tension. At the end of this extraordinary speech, on the words " the house was full of light", the actor seems to me to be quietly, without tears, weeping. I think that the beauty and tragedy of this scene depends entirely on listening carefully to what may be going on beneath the words or action. It is a source of fascination to me how the technique of great acting (Vivien Merchant and Ian Holm) can effect this magical transformation. It is rare and immeasurably precious. 8 of 11 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you?

Yes The Homecoming - Review - Harold Pinter - Theater - The New York Times The New York Times Theater Reviews |You Can Go Home Again, but You’ll Pay the Consequences Search Theater Reviews | Theater Review | 'The Homecoming' You Can Go Home Again, but You’ll Pay the Consequences The Homecoming Closing Date: April 13, 2008 Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200 Continue reading the main story First of all, it really is that good. You would expect it to have shrunk over the years, the way buildings that loomed large in your childhood seem smaller when you revisit them. But as the first-rate revival that opened Sunday night at the Cort Theater makes electrifyingly clear, “The Homecoming” is every bit as big as its reputation. Forty years after its Broadway debut titillated and outraged American theatergoers, this Harold Pinter masterpiece of family warfare continues to unsettle. It’s not the play’s sexual content or the blood-drawing viciousness of the clan it portrays.

After all, since “The Homecoming” first opened, kinfolk in kitchen-sink dramas, including the current hit “August: Osage County,” have regularly provided far more explicitly detailed catalogs of their hatreds and perversions. But like most great art “The Homecoming” operates on a mythic as well as an immediate level. It insists that some shadowy part of you is part of it. It burrows under you skin and festers. Mr. Pinter, you see, knows where you live. “The Homecoming” conveys this knowledge by stealth and, more often than not, by stillness. And the fine cast assembled for Daniel Sullivan ’s new production — including Eve Best and Raúl Esparza in benchmark performances — grasps the power of holding back in making a fathoms-deep impression. Continue reading the main story The timing for this “Homecoming,” the first play by Mr. Pinter on Broadway since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, is ideal, and not just because it’s the 40th anniversary of its New York premiere. It’s December, remember? The month when children of all ages return to the family hearth and often get burned.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story You may initially think you have little in common with the North London household headed by the scabrous Max ( Ian McShane ). But you soon start to sense a disquieting familiarity in the patterns of domestic friction. Come on, don’t tell me that when you go home, or when relatives visit you, there aren’t clashes over who does the dishes, who ate the last snack, who goes to bed first, who sits in the most comfortable chair, whose memories of your shared past are the truth. These small battles of one-upmanship are the fabric of existence for Max; his brother, Sam ( Michael McKean ); and Max’s two grown sons who still live with him, Lenny (Mr. Esparza) and Joey (Gareth Saxe). Photo All in the warring family: from left, Ian McShane, Raúl Esparza, Eve Best and Gareth Saxe in The Homecoming, 40 years after this Harold Pinter play had its Broadway premiere.

Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times The stakes rise, as they will when a long-absent relative returns, when Teddy (James Frain), a professor of philosophy living in the States, shows up in the middle of the night with his wife, Ruth (Ms. Best). Who’s top dog now? The claim to that title is ultimately fought in ways I hope will never be visited upon your family. That doesn’t mean that the play’s uncomfortable universality goes away. Mr. Pinter’s particular brilliance is in sliding imperceptibly from the ordinary surface to the primal darkness of what lies beneath. The nigh-perfect form of “The Homecoming,” as the critic Penelope Gilliatt wrote when it opened in London in 1965, is in “the swaying of violent people as they gain minute advantages.” That dynamic, which propels most of Mr. Pinter’s plays, is seldom successfully realized in American productions. (Recent Broadway revivals of Pinter plays I love, like “Betrayal” and “The Caretaker,” left me cold.) That’s partly because English class accents are important in landing the cadences (and establishing the balance of power) in Mr.

Pinter’s famously pause-pocked dialogue. It is also no easy matter for any actor to find the character-defining noise in Mr. Pinter’s silences. Playing Pinter requires repressing the urge to act actively. Mr. Sullivan’s cast keeps the lid on itself so impressively that when eruptions occur, you feel you’ve been sucker-punched. Such restraint is especially remarkable in Mr. Esparza, who made his reputation as one of the showiest actors in town (“The Normal Heart,” “Taboo”). For this year’s revival of the musical “Company” he learned to stand still, with gratifying results. That didn’t prepare me for the intricate layers he brings to the entrepreneurial Lenny. With only minor adjustments of facial expression and vocal inflection, Mr. Esparza conveys a multitude of impulses, simmering in coexistence. In a breath he suggests a petulant adolescent, an icy killer, a take-charge businessman and an infant who only wants Mommy. His is the most visibly needy Lenny I’ve encountered. But this extra transparency never cancels out the enigma at the core of all Pinter characters. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The same can be said of Ms.

Best, a much-lauded London stage actress who made her Broadway debut this year opposite Kevin Spacey in “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” This fine-boned actress did wonders then in expanding to fill a part that calls for a “giantess.” Here she’s an absolute knockout. Photo Ian McShane as the patriarch Max in The Homecoming. Credit Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Ruth is the most fraught of the roles, a sphinxlike woman who has been defined by critics as both a feminist and a misogynistic creation. But like Mr. Esparza, Ms. Best lends her character the sense of a complete emotional history that I’d never grasped before. In the company of men Ruth is as guarded and calculated as they come, calmly registering disapproval and amused contempt with the merest lowering of her eyelids. But there are a couple of moments, when she thinks no one is watching, when this Ruth reveals the weary, wistful face beneath the sang-froid. You sense she wishes that the rules of the game she must play were different. As it is, she still trumps the competition. Mr.

McKean, who became famous as a comic television and film actor, gives a beautifully calibrated, heartbreaking performance as the proper, dutiful Sam. And the relatively unknown Mr. Saxe and Mr. Frain are superb as the dopey, brawny Joey and the disdainful, uxorious Teddy. Like their fellow cast members they give archetypal characters revelatory and particularizing shading. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Mr. McShane (known as the ace expletive-spitter of television’s “Deadwood”) is also excellent, with one caveat. He seems too robust for a decaying man who knows his virility is waning. He is dazzling, though, in switching between scorching venom and synthetic sentimentality. Pretty much every detail is in correct place in this production, including Eugene Lee’s cozy minefield of a living room and Jess Goldstein’s class-situating costumes. It’s clear we’re in the middle of the 1960s, but the view is not through a telescope.

People who were originally put off by “The Homecoming” may now find it too close to home. It’s a bit like Picasso’s shockingly severe painting of Gertrude Stein from 1906, the one he predicted in time would resemble its subject. We may not have thought we saw ourselves in “The Homecoming” four decades ago. Now it feels like a mirror. THE HOMECOMING By Harold Pinter ; directed by Daniel Sullivan ; sets by Eugene Lee; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Kenneth Posner; sound by John Gromada; production stage manager, Roy Harris; fight director, Rick Sordelet; general manager, Albert Poland; technical supervision, Hudson Theatrical Associates. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Ergo Entertainment, Barbara and Buddy Freitag, Michael Gardner, Herbert Goldsmith Productions, Terry E. Schnuck, Harold Thau, Michael Filerman/Lynne Peyser and Ronald Frankel/David Jaroslawicz, in association with Joseph Piacentile. At the Cort Theater, 138 West 48th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200.

Through April 13. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. WITH: Ian McShane (Max), Raúl Esparza (Lenny), Eve Best (Ruth), Michael McKean (Sam), James Frain (Teddy) and Gareth Saxe (Joey). The Homecoming Pinter's "The Homecoming" at Venice's Pacific Resident Theatre! | The Huffington Post Pinter's "The Homecoming" at Venice's Pacific Resident Theatre! 06/05/2015 05:40 pm ET | Updated Jun 04, 2016 Jay Weston Publisher, Jay Weston's Restaurant Newsletter all photos from Pacific Harold Pinter was an Englishman who wrote powerful, controversial plays....so successfully that he was honored with a Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2005.

I had the honor of meeting the dapper, delightful playwright in 1967 when I was production head of an ABC film company, Palomar, and we made a movie in England of his early play, "The Birthday Party." Although the play had only run one week when it opened in London in 1958, it later was seen by 11 million people when it was telecast in 1960. Our small feature was notable mainly for the fact that I had hired a young untested Chicago television director, Billy Friedkin (his only previous feature credit was a Sonny & Cher movie, Good Times) to direct. He did a commendable job and you may recall that he went on to direct celebrated films like "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist." Currently married to film exec Sherry Lansing, Billy got into a contretemp last year when he was directing a production of "The Birthday Party" at Westwood's Geffen Playhouse and had a run-in with a British actor playing the lead. The actor walked (back to London), the show was cancelled a week before it was scheduled to open. Cast of the current production.

When I heard that the excellent Pacific Resident Theatre Company (703 Venice Blvd, four blocks west of Lincoln, with a parking lot at the rear of the theatre, (310-822-8392) was putting on a production at their Venice theatre of Pinter's 'THE HOMECOMING," I made arrangements to attend an early performance with a friend in the company. You may recall that I favorably reviewed their performance last year of the critically-acclaimed Henry V, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos, who was also directing this version of The Homecoming. I had first seen the Pinter play when it opened in New York in 1967 and, directed by Sir Peter Hall, it won the Tony Award as best play for that year. The female lead, Ruth, in that production was played by Pinter's first wife, actress Vivien Merchant, also nominated for a Tony. (He later divorced her and, in a juicy scandal, married novelist Lady Antonia Fraser. It was a very successful, compatible marriage.) Steve Spiro and Leslie Fera I have seen several productions of it and think that it is probably Pinter's best play.

It's been more than a decade since this Tony-award winning play has been seen here in Los Angeles, more's the pity. It's a powerful, weird and wonderful drama....typical Pinteresque twists-and-turns. Incidentally, as I entered the theatre on Friday night, I was greeted by the great character actor, Orson Bean, and companion Alley Mills, who both told me of their pleasure in reading these Huffington posts almost every day. "I played Lennie in this play over 30 years ago," 'O' added. After the show, we caucused on the Venice Blvd, sidewalk and agreed that it was one of the better renderings of Pinter's work any of us had ever seen. Superbly cast and brilliantly performed. Scene towards the end of the play. I don't want to 'spoil' the story for readers, but I can tell you that it is set in North London, in a rambling old house there. All of the action takes place in the living room, and we meet the six characters comprising the cast. The patriarch of the family, Max ((Jude Ciccolella) , is a retired butcher whose wife died a few years before.

(In a BBC radio production of the play done in 2007, Pinter played Max. He also played Lennie on stage in the 60's.) Max's brother, Sam (Anthony Fours) , early sixties, is a chauffeur, never married and the only sympathetic character. Max's three sons are here: Lenny (Jason Downs) is a slimy one. Joey (Steve Spiro) is a dim-witted would-be boxer who works in "demolition," and then there is Teddy (Trent Dawson), an expat philosophy professor who returns from six years in America with his British wife, Ruth (Leslie Fera). Ruth is, for me, the fulcrum character of the play, an attractive sexually-appealing mature woman who has a London background only later revealed. The brilllian actress Marwa Bernstein is alternating with Leslie on weekends in late June and July. Elspeth Weingarten produced the show and the indefatigable Marilyn Fox is Artistic Dirctor. It is a revelation to see such masterful acting performances in a small regional theatre!

This play is the epitome of Pinter's syle: ambiguous, minimalistic, startling, often funny ...a family romance and a turf war. The concept of family love is turned on its head here before the end. A reviewer once descibed it as a 'moral vacuum.' Yes, indeed. But fascinating, so I strongly recommend a trip down Venice Blvd. to that house in North London. To subscribe to Jay Weston's Restaurant Newsletter ($70 for twelve monthly issues) email him at jayweston@sbcglobal.net Follow Jay Weston on Twitter: More: HAROLD PINTER - John Lahr - writer, critic, theatre reviewer, novelist, show business profiles Demolition Man Harold Pinter and The Homecoming, from The New Yorker, December, 2007 On a grisly London evening last October, as the Victorian street lamps of Holland Park were flickering in the twilight, I arrived too early for an appointment at Harold Pinter’s handsome town house.

Pinter, who is seventy-seven, and who, for the past five years, has battled esophageal cancer and a rare skin disease that has twice brought him near death, had insisted that I come by, even though he’d been ill earlier in the week. “Better strike while the iron is hot,” he’d said. I could see him through the high, arched window of his living room, parked in an armchair by the fire, almost sculptural. A walker was strategically positioned behind him. For decades a dynamo—the author of some thirty plays and two dozen screenplays, the director of more than twenty productions, and an influence on such dramatists as Heathcote Williams, Joe Orton, David Hare, and David Mamet—Pinter was winding down. Over the years, Pinter’s work has inspired a journal (The Pinter Review), added words to the English language (the Oxford English Dictionary lists “Pinteresque,” “Pinterism,” “Pinterian,” and “Pinterishness” as acceptable terms), won dozens of awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2005, and made him an object of perpetual public fascination in Britain.

(His recent performance in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” at the Royal Court—he began his career as an actor—sold out its entire run in sixteen minutes.) No other British playwright since Noël Coward has so dominated and defined the theatrical landscape of his time. Even Coward, who hated the New Wave that put him out of fashion, considered Pinter an exception. “Your writing absolutely fascinates me,” he wrote to Pinter in 1965 after seeing his third full-length play, “The Homecoming.” “You cheerfully break every rule of the theatre that I was brought up to believe in, except the cardinal one of never boring for a split-second. I love your choice of words, your resolute refusal to explain anything and the arrogant, but triumphant demands you make on the audience’s imagination. I can well see why some clots hate it, but I belong to the opposite camp—if you will forgive the expression.” I leaned against a wall rereading “The Homecoming,” which was what I’d come to discuss with Pinter and which was about to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of its début on Broadway with a new production at the Cort Theatre (directed by Daniel Sullivan).

The paperback copy of the play that I held in my hands had been purchased during the Broadway début, at the Music Box, under the sensational direction of Peter Hall, in 1967. I’d seen the show on a Tuesday, bought the play at intermission, and returned to the Wednesday matinée to notate the blocking. “The Homecoming” changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes. In 1967, I didn’t know quite what I’d seen; I knew only that the play’s spectacular combination of mystery and rigor had taught me something new about life, about language, about the nature of dramatic storytelling. Pinter had taken the narration out of theatre: “The Homecoming” offered no explanations, no theory, no truths, no through line, no certainties of any kind.

I was drawn to the charisma of the work in the same way that Pinter—I later learned—had been compelled by Shakespeare. “You are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you, in which the mind is subject to an intense diversity of atmospheric,” he wrote in “A Note on Shakespeare,” in 1950, six years before he started to do a similar thing with his own plays. I was teaching night school when I first saw “The Homecoming,” and I wanted to use the play in my class. I wrote to Pinter in care of the theatre. To my amazement, he replied. We met at Sam’s, near the Music Box, on Forty-fifth Street. I was twenty-six. I had never met a playwright before.

I couldn’t have known then how frequently our paths would intersect over the decades: “The Homecoming” was the subject of my first book; for a few years in the early eighties, Pinter’s son, Daniel Brand, from whom he is now estranged, was a tenant in my house; and my friend and downstairs neighbor in London, the director Karel Reisz, was probably the best interpreter of Pinter’s later plays and the director of one of Pinter’s best screen adaptations, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981). While Reisz and Pinter were working on their screenplay, Pinter’s silver Mercedes convertible was often parked outside our house. Once, just before a work session, my wife and our four-year-old son, Chris, sat at Reisz’s kitchen table with Pinter as he held forth in his commanding manner. When Pinter left the room, Chris turned to us and asked, “Is he a policeman?” “No,” his mother said. “He’s a very good writer.” “Can he make a ‘W’?” Chris asked.

(Pinter alluded to that incident in his introduction to Volume IV of his “Plays”; “One of the most interesting—and indeed acute—critical questions I’ve ever heard,” he wrote.) “The Homecoming” is the last and best play of Pinter’s fecund early period (1957-65). It is a culmination of the poetic ambiguities, the minimalism, and the linguistic tropes of his earlier major plays: “The Birthday Party” (1958), whose first production lasted only a week in London, though the play was seen by eleven million people when it was broadcast on TV in 1960, and “The Caretaker” (1960), an immediate international hit. “The Homecoming” is both a family romance and a turf war. A professor of philosophy, Teddy, returns to London after six years in America to introduce his wife, Ruth, to his father, a butcher named Max, to his uncle Sam, a chauffeur, and to his brothers, Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, an aspiring boxer, all of whom haunt Max’s cavernous living room, a sort of cave for the barbarians within.

By contrast, Pinter’s living room is capacious and elegant, overflowing with books, family photographs, paintings, and flowers. The first time I met Pinter to talk about “The Homecoming,” he was dressed in a black leather jacket, a black turtleneck, and black pants; forty years later, he was still in black, except for a raffish pair of pink wool socks that he wore, he explained, for circulation reasons. Pinter has always been as vigilant about his look as about his prose. He is not a dandy; he is an actor in the habit of watching himself go by. The beloved only son of a Jewish East End tailor, he was, even as a young man, what might then have been called “natty.” Black, his favored color, set him apart and generated an aura of authority about him; it also worked as a kind of spotlight, focussing the viewer’s eye on the sharp features of his large head. Like his plays, the young Pinter combined an external formality with an internal ferocity. Even now, recuperating from illness, he had an exactness, a scrupulousness of mental focus, that generated a palpable tension.

In his negotiations with the world, Pinter always seems braced. “There is a sense of danger about him all the time,” Peter Hall, who has directed seven of Pinter’s plays, including “Betrayal” (1978), the best drama of his middle period, told me. “Although he’s the most good-hearted and generous man, people are frightened of him. He has this stentorian voice and a very rich vocabulary. He also has a kind of physical presence. You can quite see him hitting somebody.” When I leaned forward to pour the wine that had been set out for us, Pinter took the bottle away from me. “I can still pour a glass of wine,” he said. The author’s position is an odd one,” Pinter said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “The characters resist him; they are not easy to live with; they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent, you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind-man’s bluff, hide-and-seek.” In “The Homecoming,” Pinter’s game of hide-and-seek begins with the play’s ironic title. Whose homecoming is it?

At first glance, it seems to be Teddy’s. Or is it Ruth’s? As we discover, she was born nearby. Ruth knows the lay of this desiccated land, with its reservoirs of furious disappointment. Her comfort in this milieu is what makes credible her eventual outrageous decision to leave Teddy and her three children and stay in Max’s female-starved household. In this neglected environment, Ruth, at last, feels needed. In one way or another, she is the object of each man’s hidden desires: the aging Max wants to feel potent; Sam wants company; Joey wants to be nurtured; and Lenny wants a trick to put on the game. Sensual, elegant, and private, Ruth hides her anger behind a façade of self-control—which Pinter makes clear, in a scene in which she encounters Lenny on the night of her arrival. Ruth knows Lenny’s argot; she reads the vulnerability behind his brazen aggression. Later, when Lenny tries to take a glass of water from her hand, Ruth calls his bluff. She holds her glass toward him: RUTH: Have a sip. Go on. Have a sip from my glass. He is still. Sit on my lap.

Take a long cool sip. She pats her lap. Pause. She stands, moves to him with the glass. Put your head back and open your mouth. LENNY: Take that glass away from me. RUTH: Lie on the floor. Go on. I’ll pour it down your throat. LENNY: What are you doing, making me some kind of proposal? She laughs shortly, drains the glass. “”The Homecoming” ’s territorial free-for-all is waged with a rhetorical panache that is almost Jacobean in its richness and its ferocity. Its vulgar verbal impasto created a stage sound that was entirely new. Pinter, according to David Hare, “cleaned the gutters of the English language.” “He kicked the whole thing down,” David Mamet said. Nowhere in the decorous restraint of postwar British theatre could you hear, for instance, anything approaching the brio of Max’s roaring tirades at his “wet wick” brother: “One lot after the other. One mess after the other. . . . Look what I’m lumbered with. One cast-iron bunch of crap after another.

One flow of stinking pus after another.” Until Pinter, contemporary British playwrights had purveyed a series of well-made forms of exposition. Terence Rattigan admonished society in neatly resolved problem plays; John Osborne hectored Britain and took its temperature; Noël Coward made charm his solution; Arnold Wesker sent a Socialist message through his characters, and T. S. Eliot a Christian one. “The attitude behind this sort of thing might be summed up in one phrase: ‘I’m telling you,’ ” Pinter said in 1962. Pinter’s plays, on the other hand, offered no exhortations, no admonitions, no solutions, no common ground among people. “I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it’s more like a quicksand,” he wrote. “We are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened?” Pinter’s plays reënact this difficulty of knowing. “Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labelled and ready for export is dead . . .

and meaningless,” he wrote in a letter to the first director of “The Birthday Party,” in which he refused to explain his characters. In another letter, to a British theatre magazine, in 1958, Pinter wrote, “To supply an explicit moral tag to an evolving and compulsive dramatic image seems to me facile, impertinent, and dishonest. Where this takes place it is not theatre but a crossword puzzle. The audience holds the paper. The play fills in the blanks. Everyone’s happy. There has been no conflict between audience and play, no participation, nothing has been exposed. We walk out as we went in.” At the brilliant finale of “The Homecoming,” as Ruth is enthroned in Max’s chair, with the new order established and the men grouped around her, Max falls to the floor and sobs; he crawls toward Ruth, who is stroking Joey’s hair like a lap cat. “I’m not an old man,” Max says. “Do you hear me? Kiss me.” As the curtain falls, it is clear that the distribution of power among the people onstage is poised to change. But neither the characters nor the audience knows what that rearrangement will be.

Earlier in the play, Lenny tells a tall tale about having beaten a woman who was “falling apart with the pox.” Ruth punctures his story with a practical question: “How did you know she was diseased?” “How did I know?” Lenny says. “I decided she was.” The truth, in other words, is anybody’s guess. Meaning is what you make it. (Pinter’s refusal to draw conclusions in his plays means that some productions capitulate to the anxiety of the unknown. When the curtain came up on a Bulgarian staging of “The Homecoming,” he thought he was in the wrong theatre. “A large man and a small woman were running around the stage, looking into a lighted house,” he said. “They kept coming back, these two, in various guises and modes.” These additions turned out to be two frequently invoked but always offstage characters—MacGregor, Max’s legendary mate, and Jessie, Max’s faithless wife.) The territorial battle being waged in “The Homecoming” is ultimately not about the house or the woman but about whose perception of reality will prevail. Teddy, a professional maker of meanings, insists, “I’m the one who can see.

That’s why I can write my critical works.” Ruth, however, has a physicality that overrides Teddy’s epistemology. “Look at me,” she says. “I . . . move my leg. That’s all it is. But I wear . . . underwear . . . which moves with me . . . it . . . captures your attention. . . . The action is simple. It’s a leg . . . moving. My lips move. Why don’t you restrict . . . your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant . . . than the words which come through them.” The thrill of the play is its realization of Pinter’s aesthetic: a precarious balance between ambiguity and actuality. “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false,” Pinter said in his Nobel speech. “A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” This paradoxical approach forces both the actors and the audience to play harder.

Both are drawn into a highly charged dramatic metaphor in which, as Pinter said, “everything to do with the play is in the play.” The characters’ parries, challenges, and volte-faces are violently emotional improvisations, whose drama is only underscored and heightened by Pinter’s signature pauses. “The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear,” he once wrote. “It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place.” “When we were rehearsing ‘The Homecoming,’ ” Peter Hall told me, “I remember Paul Rogers saying to me, very early on, ‘What’s all this about the pauses? We decide where the pauses are.’ And I said, ‘No, you don’t. Not anymore. The author has decreed where the pauses are. It’s our job to find out why they’re there.’ ” “One pause is quite unlike another pause,” Pinter said suddenly as we were talking, then stopped. “There, I just paused. That didn’t take me very long. A pause can be a breath.

What it has to do with is thought: what has just been said and how to respond to what has been said. Pauses are not musical devices. They should be natural.” Pinter’s wife, the historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, describes pauses as “the curse of Pinter.” Pinter has sometimes cursed them as well. He attended a rehearsal for one all-star production of “The Homecoming” (with Pierre Brasseur, Emmanuelle Riva, and Claude Rich, at the Théâtre de Paris) that he thought ran an hour too long. “They took my word ‘pause’ literally,” he said. “It was an extremely tedious enterprise.” “The Homecoming” is a summation of the iconoclasm and the truculence that brought Pinter to the peak of his writing career. When he was a young man, anger defined him. “I’d never met anyone like this before,” Dilys Hamlett, an early girlfriend of Pinter’s, told his biographer Michael Billington. “I always have an image of Harold striding down the street in his navy-blue coat with a rage against the world.

But it was also a rage for life, a rage to do something, a rage to achieve something.” By the time he was twenty, Pinter had renounced Jewish orthodoxy, military service (he was a conscientious objector), and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art; by the time he was thirty, he had abdicated the principles of contemporary dramaturgy. He wrote “The Homecoming” in six weeks in 1964. “It kind of wrote itself,” he said. He remembers being surprised by the process and laughing a lot at the toxic, belligerent family that was emerging from him. By then, Pinter had got together enough money to move, with his first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, and their infant son, from a cramped flat in Chiswick to a bow-fronted Regency house in Worthing, on the Sussex coast. The magnificent barrenness of the play’s North London setting was imagined as he sat at his writing desk overlooking gardens, within earshot of the sea.

When Pinter finished the play, he gave it to Joe Brearley, the inspirational teacher who had first introduced him to drama when he was still a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School, in the mid-forties. (Brearley had also cast Pinter as Macbeth in a school production in which he got national attention—“Master Harold Pinter made a more eloquent, more obviously nerve-racked Macbeth than one or two professional grown-ups I have seen in the part of late years,” Alan Dent wrote in the News Chronicle.) Brearley had been adopted as an honorary paternal member of Pinter’s close-knit gang of friends, whose competitive camaraderie played a crucial part in his coming-of-age, and he happened to be visiting Pinter in Sussex. “I gave him the play to read,” Pinter recalled. “I waited in another room. About two hours later, I heard the front door slam. I thought, Well, here we are. He doesn’t like it. About an hour later, the doorbell rang. I answered it. He said, ‘I had to get some air.’ He said, ‘It is your best.’ ” Pinter, on some level, agrees.

“I think it’s the most muscular thing I’ve written,” he told me. “I delight and relish in language. I certainly did with ‘The Homecoming’ to an extent that I probably haven’t done in any other play.” Pinter, who wrote poetry long before he attempted a play, creates drama like a poem, working entirely out of the unconscious. He starts with an image or a phrase; he teases it out, listening and rearranging until the words suggest a character and the character suggests an action. In an early note for “The Homecoming,” he scrawled the word “jealousy.” Beside it, like a sort of rhyme scheme, he wrote: A of B and C C of B and A B of A and C When the characters finally arrive on the page, Pinter knows no more than what they tell him. As he told a group of drama students in 1962, “You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling. But it’s out of these attributes that a language arises.

A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said.” In this sense, Pinter took the actor’s understanding of subtext and turned it into a metaphysic. This discovery allowed him to distill and reconfigure the inspiration of Samuel Beckett—he was reading Beckett from 1950 on—into his own distinctive rhythmical, alliterative idiom, which made a drama of utterance, not explanation, and where the appearance of reality was an uncompromising dissection of the unknown. Mamet, speaking of Pinter and Beckett, said, “They did what few dramatists have done in modern times: they construed the drama not as the interplay of ideas but as the interplay of sounds. That is, they understood the drama as a poem, which had the capacity to move, as does a real poem, musically—to affect on a pre-rational level.” “Over the previous ten years, there’d been quite a lot of talk about the regeneration of theatre in poetic terms—Eliot, Fry, Auden,” Hall told me. “Harold seemed to me to encompass all that and more. He should be seen as a poetic dramatist.

It’s the use of words in an extremely disciplined, contained way. It uses, in fact, all the time-honored devices of rhetoric, but it doesn’t parade them. Harold didn’t want something that made a statement, because a statement was lacking in ambiguity.” After years of performing thrillers and melodramas in repertory, Pinter also wanted, he said, “nothing from the bargain basement” of boulevard entertainment. For “The Homecoming,” he began with a sentence, the play’s opening words: “What have you done with the scissors?” “I didn’t know who was saying it,” he said. “I didn’t know who he was talking to. Now, the fellow he was talking to—if he had said, ‘Oh, I’ve got them right here, Dad,’ there would have been no play. But instead he says, ‘Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?’ Once that’s said, there’s a spring of drama, which develops and follows its own course. I had no idea what the course was going to be. I hadn’t planned anything. In the back of my mind, I think I knew there was another brother going to come back.

I think I saw them quite early in a big house, with the doors being taken down, leading to a stairway. I saw them moving in that space.” “An old house in North London”: “The Homecoming” ’s first stage direction situates the play both in an internal landscape and in the atmosphere and the idiom of Pinter’s Hackney youth. “It’s all to do with me in some way or another,” he said in a television interview in 1965. “You’re not consciously looking back to Hackney, to the life, the values, the threats. Not at all. . . . But it’s a world related to you, otherwise you wouldn’t write it.” The play’s dialogue, a kind of constant face-off between characters, is lifted from the Cockney lingua franca with which Pinter and his mates used to tease each other, as well as the local fascists who bullied them. “We’d go into one of their cafés and say, ‘Cup of tea and a sort-out, please,’ ” Pinter’s longstanding friend the actor Henry Woolf told me. “We had a few encounters.

I’ve seen Harold hold off a whole mob of them.” Even then, among his friends, Pinter was a pathfinder. “He was extremely adventurous,” Woolf said. “I must give him credit for that. We were just beginning to trot, and he was galloping. Socially, sexually, he was precocious. He was sniffing around London.” In “The Homecoming,” the characters also bowl around London—the docks, the West End, Eaton Square, Wormwood Scrubs. Like the claustrophobic dereliction of Max’s house, Hackney was, for Pinter, “a kind of prison.” In time, that oppressiveness fuelled a group exodus. One of Pinter’s closest friends, Morris (Moishe) Wernick, having secretly married, immigrated to Canada, where he taught high-school history; eight years later, in 1964—just before “The Homecoming” was written—Wernick returned for the first time to introduce his wife and his children to his father. That situation was Pinter’s springboard. Max was also fabricated partly from Pinter’s Wernick-family memories.

“The image of Moishe’s father in cap and plimsolls was one I carried with me,” he told Michael Billington. “I knew him to be a pretty authoritarian figure. A really tough old bugger.” When Woolf saw the play, he called the resemblance “otherworldly.” “Harold had captured the tone of the voice and the environment,” he said. “There was just the same sniff in the kitchens of the two houses.” The success of “The Homecoming” catapulted Pinter into an unmooring few years. In 1964, he moved Merchant and their son into an imposing six-story town house on Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park. “Nobody just rings the door and comes in,” he said. Antonia Fraser told Billington, “It was the grandest house I’ve ever been in. . . . Every room was immaculate with this terrible silence.” As Pinter’s circumstances changed, so did his plays. They became smaller in scale, more internal, more mannered and abstract.

(Only in his late masterpiece “Moonlight,” of 1993, did Pinter provide a metaphor as searing and complete as in “The Homecoming.”) Increasingly cut off by his celebrity from the roiling world that had made him, Pinter soon hit an impasse. “I am writing nothing and can write nothing,” he said, while accepting the Shakespeare Prize, in 1970. “I don’t know why. It’s a very bad feeling, I know that, but I must say I want more than anything else to fill up a blank page again, and to feel that strange thing happen, birth through fingertips.” He added, “When you can’t write, you feel you’ve been banished from yourself.” Pinter waited out his unconscious by hiring himself out as a director and screenwriter between plays. The screenplays—including “The Quiller Memorandum,” “The Go-Between,” “Accident,” and “Langrishe, Go Down”—allowed him to practice his craft and bide his time until his own characters returned.

In the forty years since the début of “The Homecoming” on Broadway (it received a lukewarm critical reception before becoming a cause célèbre), the play has gone from controversy to classic. As one of drama’s preëminent stylists, Pinter has had the good fortune to live long enough to instruct other theatricals about his idiom and to have enjoyed a number of first-rate productions of his work. In the beginning, “The Homecoming” was a vexing avant-garde conundrum; now it’s essential reading on every modern-theatre syllabus. Time has made the audience and the actors more aware of Pinter’s game; this relaxation allows for a greater appreciation of the gusto of his humor, as well as of his intellectual daring. Among the many pleasures of the current Broadway revival—a fine ensemble, adroit playing, limpid interpretation—the most piquant is the revelation that the play is profoundly funny.

Laughter can excuse many things; here, it triumphs over Eugene Lee’s misjudged set, which sits like a lean-to in the middle of the Cort’s wide stage, flanked on either side by flats designed to look like shiny black brick walls—which have neither the whiff of authenticity nor the appropriate atmosphere of collapse. This incongruity is not as bothersome, however, as the set’s lack of containment—there are no sidewalls—which allows the psychic pressure of the jousting to dissipate somewhat. “What do you think of the room? Big, isn’t it?” Teddy (the excellent James Frain) says, when he introduces Ruth (Eve Best) to the place. The line is startling not because the room is vast but because it isn’t. From the tattered hallway wallpaper and the exposed beams above the living room’s threshold, it’s clear that Max’s house is dilapidated; however, it is still, to my eyes at least, overdecorated, with a colored pitcher and glasses, a mirror, Joey’s dumbbells visible under a record-player.

The set does little to enhance the play’s minimalist resonances, but at least it doesn’t impede the nuance of Pinter’s language, which like all great poetry yields up more insight with each viewing. There are many tasty interpretations here—the punishing punctilio of Michael McKean’s Sam, the lapdog loneliness of Gareth Saxe’s Joey—but Eve Best’s Ruth is the most revelatory. The original Ruth—Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant—was memorable but arch. Best is soft and accessible, which makes Ruth’s battened-down alienation all the more exciting. At one point in Act II, Ruth, perched on the arm of a chair, looking into the middle distance, and holding a cup of coffee, begins to tell Max about her past. “I was . . . different . . . when I met Teddy . . . first.” “No, you weren’t,” Teddy says. “You were the same.” Teddy refuses to see Ruth as she is. Best turns her head away; her cup chinks against the saucer. The sound, like that of a stone dropped into a well, registers the depth of the distance between them. Best’s articulate energy raises Frain’s game.

His Teddy unearths from the script’s buried treasures something new to me: he makes us see the ruthlessness of Teddy’s indifference. Teddy doesn’t give a damn about Ruth. (“You can help me with my lectures when we get back,” he says, by way of trying to lure her home to their American life.) Just as Teddy comes downstairs with their bags packed, Lenny (Raúl Esparza) asks Ruth for a dance. They sway together to a moody tune, then they kiss. As Best pulls out of the embrace, her head tilts back as if she were gulping water after a long thirst. The moment is terrific. Ruth’s desire is finally both acknowledged and answered. Because Best is able to chart this emotional desert with such depth and precision, Ruth’s final line to Teddy as he leaves—“Don’t become a stranger”—illuminates the enormity of her perverse revenge, at once devastating and tormenting. Ian McShane, as Max, knows the Pinter terrain well; he gets all the music he can out of Max’s scatological rants.

Max’s vituperative gas, as McShane deftly demonstrates, is a coverup for his sexual inadequacy. McShane’s biggest acting challenge—he’s a handsome, virile sixty-five—is to make the audience believe in both Max’s age and his impotence. McShane pulls it off, but some padding in his costume and some cumbersome weight on the cane that he brandishes with a majorette’s aplomb wouldn’t go amiss. “I’ve stopped writing plays,” Pinter told me, as our conversation was drawing to a close. “I’m weary.” The previous week, he’d gone to the hospital for a brain scan. “You know what you’ll find in there,” he had told the lab technician. “A lot of unwritten plays.” I asked him if writing required a ferocity that he no longer had. Pinter smiled wanly. “I still have quite a bit of ferocity knocking around,” he said. “It’s how to embody it.” Pinter’s literary strength—his easy access to his own turbulent internal climate—has also been his public weakness.

The press, which has consistently berated him for what it portrays as his vainglorious diatribes, has never quite understood that his arrogance is the flip side of his brilliance; you couldn’t have the big artist without the big mouth. “I’m well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being ‘enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding,’ ” Pinter said in 1995. “Well, I do have my moods, like anyone else.” To call Pinter’s outbursts “moods” is like calling a tsunami a wave. Pinter, like his characters, is porous; bellicosity is the firewall that he has built against threats to his interior, whether from people or ideas. On the page, his volatility has made art; in life, all too frequently, it makes headlines. It can be argued that Pinter’s dramas, with their undermining of authority and their dissection of the power plays in group dynamics, are essentially political.

(The 1984 play “One for the Road” and 1988’s “Mountain Language,” among others, are specifically political plays.) In the last twenty years, as the gaps between plays have grown longer, Pinter has channelled some of his anger onto the world stage. Nothing if not unpredictable—he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (“the most shameful act of my life,” he later said)—he has lent the muscle of his voice to a variety of causes, among them the Sandinistas, the freedom of Slobodan Milosevic, the end of the Iraq war, and the trial of Tony Blair as a war criminal. But his preëminent target is American foreign policy. “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them,” Pinter said in his Nobel speech.

In the rhetorical fulminations of his political poetry, he has aspired to smash through America’s self-portrayal “as a force for universal good.” “American Football,” a salvo against the 1991 Gulf War, ends almost as “The Homecoming” does: We blew their balls into shards of dust, Into shards of fucking dust. We did it. - Plays Sunday Independent - Sun. 17th June 2001 The Homecoming, Gate Theatre, Dublin Awsome Homecoming. To see a production of any play, modern classic or not, that is virtually without fault is an extraordinary experience. But that is the case with Robin Lefevre's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming for the Gate Theatre in Dublin. One hopes for everyone concerned that the playwright agrees. A writer such as Pinter has deserved iconic status; one of the reasons for that is his determined protection of the integrity and meaning of his work. And it would be gratifying for all concerned if his applause for this expression of it were to be unstinted. The Homecoming is a vile, funny, misanthropic work of genius.

And Lefevre's direction does not miss a nuance of its horrible portent form the moment the curtain rises on Lennie the pimp seated dead centre on the dreary sofa, legs spread to define his mastery of all he surveys, until it drops on his father Max, blubbering priapically at Ruth's stiletto clad feet. In between those two moments, lost brother Teddy has returned from his academic job in the United States with the wife his family never knew existed. He has clearly not communicated with her sexually or emotionally any more that he has postally with his family. And with icy, disappointed precision, Ruth takes her revenge: she moves in on the family her husband despises, choosing to go on the streets to support them while servicing them all as well. Or so they believe initially. But as Teddy leaves, defeated by his wife's silently cruel strength, she shows more of it. Joey, Lennie's loutish boxer brother, conniving Max, his brother Sam and Uriah Heep-like chauffeur, even Lennie himself may believe that Ruth will be sexually pliant.

But we the audience are left with Pinter waves washing over us: Ruth, we sense, is happy to prostitute herself but never to give herself. The silence is palpable in the play, as it is in this production, and it reeks with the nauseating stench of humanity in decay. That Pinter achieved this mastery of mundane hell through exquisitely sharp comedy of dialogue and silence (while only in his mid thirties) continues to be on of the wonders of 20th century drama. The cast is led by the extraordinary Ian Holm as Max, who sets a patriarchal table of invective and deceit that is almost unbelievably perfect. Ian Hart is cat-like, venomously pervasive as Lennie, and Jason O'Mara bumbling and brutish as Joey. John Kavanagh as Sam is a slightly weak link, seeming a little outside the cast's centred approach, perhaps because his London accent rings distinctly false in the company he's keeping. Then we come to the play's outsiders. Lia Williams is Ruth, angular, coolly perceptive, icily languorous and beautiful, and chillingly, horribly effective.

If we want to believe that such a creature cannot exist - and we do - she forces her reality down our throats. Nick Dunning is Teddy, tight-faced, tight-bodied, spine always tingling with unease as he watches life's refusal to heed him: another splendid performance. Eileen Diss's set is a perfection of run-down 1950's suburbia, lit with complex subtlety by Mick Hughes, and the sharp costumes are by Dany Everett. This is awesome theatre. Emer O'Kelly Lia Williams The Guardian - Saturday 16th June 2001 The Homecoming, Gate Theatre, Dublin The king of the jungle. We last saw Ian Holm on stage as King Lear. Now he plays Max in Robin Lefevre's stunning production of Harold Pinter's disturbing classic The Homecoming, at Dublin's Gate Theatre. And what is extraordinary is how Holm's memory of Shakespeare's mad king informs his performance of Pinter's macho butcher. Both are choleric, volatile patriarchs confronting old age and dwindling power with escalating panic.

Holm, with a mass of unruly white curls protruding from a flat cap, initially makes Max a little big-shot: a stick wielding, Cockney cock-of-the-walk who poses as an expert on everything from Epsom Downs fillies to Cuban cigars. But Holm makes brilliantly clear that all this is a front, that Max is rattled by his sons' insubordination, his brother's domestic competence, his own declining virility. The turning point comes when Max learns that his estranged son, Teddy, and Teddy's mysterious wife, Ruth, have spent the night under his roof. "Who knew?" barks Holm, sounding exactly like Lear asking "How came my man i' th' stocks?". From then on, his Max becomes an increasingly woebegone figure, grinding his teeth and prowling the stage in impotent fury. By the end he has reverted to baffled childishness as he kneels by Ruth's chair pathetically crying, "Kiss me".

It is a tremendous performance, one that reminds us of the way that classical acting can illumine a modern role, just as Olivier once brought to Osborne's deadbeat entertainer, Archie Rice, the arc of desolation he had found in Macbeth. But Holm's performance also reminds us that Pinter's play is, among many other things, about a crucial transition in power - from age to youth, and from the old king to the new queen. And sex, as this production makes clear, is at the heart of it. Lia Williams's Ruth, who readily abandons American campus life for the louche vitality of Hackney, is a figure of extraordinary poise and trouser-stirring eroticism. But, as she mockingly extends a stockinged leg to the pimping Lenny, or slowly caresses her thigh, she makes you feel that for Ruth sex is both an expression of self and a source of dominance. Many people feel that Ruth's apparent trading of her body for territory is a filthy bargain. But what comes across in Dublin is Pinter's irony - that in supplying the femininity that this animalistic, all-male household has long craved, Ruth finally supplants Max's bullying despotism.

A perverse victory is achieved by the player most ready to call the opposition's bluff. For me, the most enigmatic figure is not Ruth but Teddy, who cedes his wife with such apparent passivity. In Nick Dunning's performance, however, he becomes a figure of bouffant-haired arrogance who loftily tells his family "I'm the one who can see" and who equates sexual detachment with style. Far from being a victim, Teddy now seems a classic snob, educated out of his working-class origins. And even if Ian Hart's lean, dandyish Lenny (played by Ian Holm in the original 1965 production) could do with a shade more menace, there is excellent support from Jason O'Mara as the somnolent, prize-fighting Joey and from John Lefevre, Pinter & Colgan Photographer: Tom Lawlor Kavanagh as Max's effete chauffeur brother. But, as the end of an enthralling evening, one is left with the question of why Pinter's play still haunts us, 36 years after its premiere. I suspect it has much to do with Pinter's moral neutrality and absence of closure.

He neither condemns nor endorses this north London family. He simply presents them in all their hectic vitality. And while it is clear that Ruth has usurped Max's throne, there is no guarantee that she will fulfil the expected roles of surrogate mother and whore. As a young man, Pinter wrote a remarkable essay on Shakespeare. Pursuing the metaphor of the plays as an open wound, he wrote that Shakespeare "amputates, deadens, aggravates at will, within the limits of a particular piece, but he will not pronounce judgment or cure". Such is the lesson Pinter absorbed from the master - that drama is less a pursuit of a thesis than an exploration of contradictions. It The Homecoming still disturbs us, it is because it dramatises the domestic jungle and the atavistic power of the female, yet it defies rational analysis. Michael Billington Pinter’s “The Homecoming” at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre! « Blog « Pacific Resident Theater Pinter’s “The Homecoming” at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre!

Posted: 06/05/2015 5:40 pm EDT Updated: 06/05/2015 5:59 pm EDT Harold Pinter was an Englishman who wrote powerful, controversial plays….so successfully that he was honored with a Nobel Laureate for Literature in 2005. I had the honor of meeting the dapper, delightful playwright in 1967 when I was production head of an ABC film company, Palomar, and we made a movie in England of his early play, “The Birthday Party.” Although the play had only run one week when it opened in London in 1958, it later was seen by 11 million people when it was telecast in 1960. Our small feature was notable mainly for the fact that I had hired a young untested Chicago television director, Billy Friedkin (his only previous feature credit was a Sonny & Cher movie, Good Times) to direct.

He did a commendable job and you may recall that he went on to direct celebrated films like “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” Currently married to film exec Sherry Lansing, Billy got into a contretemp last year when he was directing a production of “The Birthday Party” at Westwood’s Geffen Playhouse and had a run-in with a British actor playing the lead. The actor walked (back to London), the show was cancelled a week before it was scheduled to open. When I heard that the excellent Pacific Resident Theatre Company (703 Venice Blvd, four blocks west of Lincoln, with a parking lot at the rear of the theatre, (310-822-8392) was putting on a production at their Venice theatre of Pinter’s ‘THE HOMECOMING,” I made arrangements to attend an early performance with a friend in the company. You may recall that I favorably reviewed their performance last year of the critically-acclaimed Henry V, directed by Guillermo Cienfuegos, who was also directing this version of The Homecoming.

I had first seen the Pinter play when it opened in New York in 1967 and, directed by Sir Peter Hall, it won the Tony Award as best play for that year. The female lead, Ruth, in that production was played by Pinter’s first wife, actress Vivien Merchant, also nominated for a Tony. (He later divorced her and, in a juicy scandal, married novelist Lady Antonia Fraser. It was a very successful, compatible marriage.) Steve Spiro and Leslie Fera I have seen several productions of it and think that it is probably Pinter’s best play. It’s been more than a decade since this Tony-award winning play has been seen here in Los Angeles, more’s the pity. It’s a powerful, weird and wonderful drama….typical Pinteresque twists-and-turns. Incidentally, as I entered the theatre on Friday night, I was greeted by the great character actor, Orson Bean, and companion Alley Mills, who both told me of their pleasure in reading these Huffington posts almost every day. “I played Lennie in this play over 30 years ago,” ‘O’ added.

After the show, we caucused on the Venice Blvd, sidewalk and agreed that it was one of the better renderings of Pinter’s work any of us had ever seen. Superbly cast and brilliantly performed. I don’t want to ‘spoil’ the story for readers, but I can tell you that it is set in North London, in a rambling old house there. All of the action takes place in the living room, and we meet the six characters comprising the cast. The patriarch of the family, Max ((Jude Ciccolella) , is a retired butcher whose wife died a few years before. (In a BBC radio production of the play done in 2007, Pinter played Max. He also played Lennie on stage in the 60′s.) Max’s brother, Sam (Anthony Fours) , early sixties, is a chauffeur, never married and the only sympathetic character. Max’s three sons are here: Lenny (Jason Downs) is a slimy one.

Joey (Steve Spiro) is a dim-witted would-be boxer who works in “demolition,” and then there is Teddy (Trent Dawson), an expat philosophy professor who returns from six years in America with his British wife, Ruth (Leslie Fera). Ruth is, for me, the fulcrum character of the play, an attractive sexually-appealing mature woman who has a London background only later revealed. The brilllian actress Marwa Bernstein is alternating with Leslie on weekends in late June and July. Elspeth Weingarten produced the show and the indefatigable Marilyn Fox is Artistic Dirctor. It is a revelation to see such masterful acting performances in a small regional theatre! This play is the epitome of Pinter’s syle: ambiguous, minimalistic, startling, often funny …a family romance and a turf war. The concept of family love is turned on its head here before the end. A reviewer once described it as a ‘moral vacuum.’ Yes, indeed. But fascinating, so I strongly recommend a trip down Venice Blvd. to that house in North London.

To subscribe to Jay Weston’s Restaurant Newsletter ($70 for twelve monthly issues) email him at jayweston@sbcglobal.net

Question: Who wrote the play "The Homecoming"?
Answer: HAROLD PINTER