The homecoming (original 1965; edição 1966)

What are we even reviewing when we review a theatre script on Goodreads? The text alone? Its "potential" as a stage piece? Actual lived experience of seeing the play? And, if that last one, as it was intended to be seen (in this case in the '60s) or as we see it more than five decades on?

Pinter's play was incredibly controversial and challenging when it premiered, and luminary director Peter Hall - then still a young upstart - cast his wife in the title role in part, I think, because a lot of female actors might have found it a bit too misogynistic in its overtones!

The piece was groundbreaking in its style, its text, its approach to the audience, its very use of the vernacular. Staged now, it can still be effective in the confines of a theatre, but a modern audience wants to interrogate the text's sexual mores, and we're also missing out on much of the zeitgeist-y stuff that drives any contemporary audience.

It seems absurd to devalue Pinter's legacy because his works are becoming part of cultural history, but let it be so. ( )

Recently reread. I can see that good actors would have a fine time with this. The dialogue is sharp and at times funny, but the play has that Pinter menace. Teddy, a philosopher, and his wife Ruth visit Teddy's family in London: the patriarch Max, Max's brother Sam, a chauffeur, and Teddy's brothers Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, a would-be boxer. Ruth turns out to be a former lady of the night. She makes a deal with Teddy's family to return to her old profession (and service the brothers), and Teddy returns back to his philosophy job in America.
Critical reaction to the play points to oedipal and freudian themes. I am undecided whether this is a callout for the role of women in 60s society or a misogynist take. Is it that Ruth can only have power by playing to male instinct?
I prefer Sam Shepard's treatment of a visit home, Buried Child. Equally dysfunctional, but somehow closer to where i live. ( )

It may be absurd, but Pinter's "The Homecoming" speaks volumes about gender dynamics of power during a time when the discussion was still taboo. ( )

I saw the play first and then read it. The play was awesome. ( )

"The eloquence of the unspoken." Words as weapons of defense. Yeah, but the supersaturatedness of the words, the deadlock of menace, the unbearable implicatedness of being, and of being a family, and of being a family of scumbags who hate each other, fills the play up and freezes it, makes it a work of timing and spaces and paradialogue. Not that any of that's bad--it just means that, while I can see this, like a thugged-out Waiting for Godot, being devastating on stage, heartbreaking, obscene, on the page it comes across as just a little bit . . . insouciant. ( )