As well as being one of the most popular, The Homecoming (1965) has proved to be among the most controversial of Harold Pinter

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As well as being one of the most popular, The Homecoming (1965) has proved to be among the most controversial of Harold Pinter's plays, at least as far as newspaper critics and academic commentators are concerned. There is no doubt that the action on stage continues to draw and hold audiences, as the play is frequently revived. The Homecoming shares a number of characteristics with Pinter's earlier comedies of menace. It is set in a dingy interior; there is throughout the play a sense of (largely) suppressed violence; the exchanges between the characters seem to be composed substantially of non sequiturs; the words that the characters actually say are divorced from what they mean (the meaning being discernible only by piercing what has been described as the irony and indifference of the surface); the naturalistic setting houses actions that smack of the surreal; the dialogue is conducted in language whose naturalism is subtly undermined, tuned, and poeticized. These are among the hallmarks of a theatrical style for which the term “Pinteresque” has been coined.

The play is concerned with the return of Teddy, a professor of philosophy at an American college, to the North London house occupied by his father, uncle, and brothers, all of whom seem to operate on the fringes of working-class society, some distance from respectability. Teddy is accompanied by his wife, Ruth, who then finds herself at the centre of a series of Pinteresque power-struggles. The men's attitudes towards women are decidedly ambivalent, as represented by the father, Max's, description of his late wife: “Mind you, she wasn't such a bad woman. Even though it made me sick just to look at her rotten stinking face, she wasn't such a bad bitch”. Max presents his wife in an even more ambivalent light later on when he says: “I've never had a whore under this roof before. Ever since your mother died”. So, the mother is represented as having been both a mother-figure and a prostitute. This madonna/whore binary can be taken as representative of the archetypical models for women that are perpetuated by the conventions of a patriarchal society. One of the primary functions of The Homecoming is arguably to expose the limitations of these archetypes. Jessie, the dead mother, is a figure whose absence is central to the play. Paradoxically, she is almost more of a looming presence in her absence than the figures who actually occupy the stage, an absent presence which is visually symbolized by the “square arch shape” demanded by the initial stage direction.

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Among the men of the house a continuing, back-biting struggle for power rumbles along, characterized by ageism and mutual attempts at feminization, in which power accrues to the man most successfully portraying himself as virile and heterosexually active. Into the midst of this walk Teddy and Ruth. Teddy stands aside from combat with the other men, though not before suffering an apparent defeat on his own ground – that of the detached intellect – at the hands of his brother Lenny. Gradually, attempts by the men to dominate Ruth are turned by her to her advantage, and she emerges as ...

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