The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, Act One -- Caedmon Records (1973)

Описание: The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Harold Pinter and first published in 1965. Its premières in London (1965) and New York (1967) were both directed by Sir Peter Hall. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. Its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play".

Set in North London, the play has six characters. Five of these are men who are related to each other: Max, a retired butcher; his brother Sam, a chauffeur; and Max's three sons: Teddy, a philosophy professor in the United States; Lenny, a pimp who only makes discreet references to his "occupation" and his clientele and flats in the city (London); and Joey, a brute training to become a professional boxer and who works in demolition.

There is one woman, Ruth, Teddy's wife. The play concerns Teddy's and Ruth's "homecoming," which has distinctly different symbolic and thematic implications. In the initial productions and the film of the same name, Pinter's first wife, Vivien Merchant, played Ruth.

Characters
Max, "a man of seventy" – The patriarch of the family.
Lenny, "a man in his early thirties" – Max's son, apparently a pimp.
Sam, "a man of sixty-three" – Max's brother, a chauffeur.
Joey, "a man in his middle twenties" – Max's son, in demolition, training to be a boxer.
Teddy, "a man in his middle thirties" – Max's son, a professor of philosophy in America.
Ruth, "a woman in her early thirties" – Teddy's wife.
Setting
The setting is an old house in North London during the summer. All of the scenes take place in the same large room, filled with various pieces of furniture. The shape of a square arch, no longer present, is visible. Beyond the room are a hallway and staircase to the upper floor and the front door.

Critical response
Often considered to be a highly ambiguous, an enigmatic, and for some even a cryptic play, The Homecoming has been the subject of extensive critical debate since it premiered.[13] According to many critics, it exposes issues of sex and power in a realistic yet aesthetically stylised manner.

Surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of the 40-anniversary Broadway production of the play at the Cort Theatre in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr describes the impact of experiencing it: "'The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence. 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 realised, could convey volumes."[12]

Like other contemporary critics familiar with The Homecoming, Ben Brantley praises the play's two-act plot structure, referring to its "nigh-perfect form."[14] In the 1960s, when first encountering the play, its earliest critics complained that, like Pinter's other plays as perceived then, The Homecoming seemed, in their words, "plotless," "meaningless," and "emotionless" (lacking character motivation), and they found the play "puzzling" (their word); later critics argue that the play evokes a multiplicity of potential meanings, leading to multiple interpretations.[15]

In "Demolition Man", Lahr considers The Homecoming to be
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.[12]

The Homecoming directly challenges the place of morals in family life and puts their social value "under erasure" (in Derridean terminology). Teddy's profession as an academic philosopher, which, he claims, enables him to "maintain ... intellectual equilibrium" —

I'm the one who can see. That's why I write my critical works. [...] I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being ... I won't be lost in it. (77–78)—

ironically raises basic philosophical questions about the nature of so-called family values and the "meaning" of "love" among family members.[16]

Occasionally, one finds critics of the play, aware of Pinter's reputation for ambiguity, questioning even Teddy's and Ruth's references to the fact of their "being married"; e.g., Harold Hobson, as cited by Merritt: "Hobson's interpretation of Teddy as merely pretending to be Ruth's husband and a professor of philosophy enables him to rationalize the man's behavior toward his wife."[17]