The Homecoming

Harold Pinter

I spent the first act of this effort from our most recent Nobel Prize winner for literature thinking "my, this is all well and good, but what is it about this play that had everyone telling me this needs to be the first Pinter I read?" Then came act two, and I understood it.

The Homecoming starts off (as you might expect given that first paragraph) unassumingly enough; a man and his wife of six years return to his ancestral home. His brothers, uncle, and father live there, and are meeting his wife for the first time; the brothers, roustabouts both of them, act a bit oddly (well, actually, a bit naturally) around the wife at first, but there's nothing terribly out of the ordinary. In fact, there's a surprising lack of family tension; the normally prickly father welcomes his wayward son home with open arms.

Then, of course, everything goes to pot in the most entertaining manner possible. I have spent years reading thousands of volumes wondering why it is that everyone has to over-emote; The Homecoming is the absolute, perfect antithesis, and I spent the entire second act wishing that these characters inhabited at least half the novels I've read in the past decade. They're deliciously perverse, and so very deadpan about it. Now, while Pinter is busy creating these characters and putting them into interesting situations (and the situations are interesting enough that the entire play can take place in a single room), he's offering some excellent satire on the family dynamic, but Pinter is talented enough to let the satire speak for itself while he concentrates on the story at hand, the mark of a man who knows how to write.

This is very good stuff, and I'll definitely be diving farther into Pinter in the coming years.