Harold Pinter Plays 3: includes The Homecoming, Old Times, and No Man’s Land

by Harold Pinter

This revised third volume of Harold Pinter's work includes The Homecoming, Old Times, No Man's Land, four shorter plays, six revue sketches and a short story. It also contains the speech given by Pinter in 1970 on being awarded the German Shakespeare Prize.





The Homecoming


'Of all Harold Pinter's major plays, The Homecoming has the most powerful narrative line... You are fascinated, lured on, sucked into the vortex.' Sunday Telegraph





'The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays.' The Times





Old Times


'A rare quality of high tension is evident, revealing in Old Times a beautifully controlled and expressive formality that has seldom been achieved since the plays of Racine.' Financial Times





'Harold Pinter's poetic, Proustian Old Times has the inscrutability of a mysterious picture, and the tension of a good thriller.' Independent





No Man's Land


'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The Times

Kindle Edition

First published March 21, 2013

About the author

Harold Pinter was a British playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. A Nobel Prize winner, Pinter was one of the most influential modern British dramatists with a writing career that spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964) and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993) and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television and film productions of his own and others' works.

Reviews

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Homecoming by Harold Pinter


The Homecoming is a provoking, intriguing, apparently classic- or anyway, not postmodern- play, with a very surprising touch –or maybe a complete transformation into? - of the absurd.

This is not The Rhinoceros by the master, perhaps the inventor of The Absurd Theater, and we have no such beasts running around on the streets of London for The Homecoming, but whereas there are very “normal, common life „aspects in parts of the Harold Pinter play, it all seems to become otherworldly at moments.
Max is the dominant character, apparently the alpha male of the pack, at least when not challenged by one of his three sons, Lenny, and he used to be a butcher and he takes pleasure in insulting, using violent language and using harsh words, only to become inexplicably reasonable moments later.

Sam is the brother of butcher- played by Michael Gambon in the BBC adaptation that this listener has had the chance to hear- and he drives a car with efficiency and displaying a likeable personality, hence the commendations, the cigars and appreciation he receives.
Lenny, one of the three sons, comes across as an intelligent, challenging, strong, assertive personage in the first part, only to reveal that he has flats, works with sex workers – prostitutes in the politically incorrect language of yesteryear- that he controls and seems to be a pimp.

That late revelation is so outré as to provoke laughter, in this play that has so much contradiction, jest, strange attitudes as to become a dark, quirky comedy, satire, a work that underlines some male abuse, dominant, harassing behavior towards the only woman in the narrative, Ruth, the wife of Teddy, the Max’s second son and a professor of philosophy.
The later couple arrives to the house of the family, after staying away in America for six years, in what constitutes The Homecoming, after a voyage to Venice, in Italy, and they enter the house late in the evening, when all the inhabitants have gone to bed, with the exception of Lenny.

The latter engages in a talk with Ruth that seems to be reasonable up to the point, where the man wants to take the glass from the guest, because father likes order in his house.

In fact, the old man is very close to the typical villain, with his foul mouth, bad temper, vicious language and attacks on all members of the family and the guest- as soon as he would see her- and the suggestion to take the wife of his son into a sort of sexual bondage….granted, she has a say in this and she seems to be willing and interested, although we may wonder if she is mentally sane.
When Lenny insists he wants the glass from his sister-in law, she refuses and the lines are repeated, furthermore, when the man keeps his request, the woman retorts- “then I will take you, if you will have my glass” and brother-in-law looks rather decent – for someone we would soon learn works as a pimp- and refuses to be taken.

This may have been the first sign that this apparent “normal” story becomes something else and the consequent acts and developments, if bizarre, follow a trend that the audience comes to expect…well, more or less.
Lenny confesses to the sister-in-law he has just met that he has once met a woman who came to him and made a proposal he was not interested in and although he admits it was a normal proposition, he has hit the woman and was considering killing her.

The characters are complex, with clear vicious, dark sides, even murderous tendencies in some cases, but with a sophisticated, intellectual, surprising, perhaps even shocking predilections for insight, philosophical contemplation…for instance, Lenny, after the statement that he was ready to kill a woman and then another story wherein he is rude to an old lady, asks his brother, doctor in philosophy, about the impossibility of Revering that which is Unknown, which seems to be the basis of religion.
When Max finds Teddy and the unknown woman in the morning, he starts with a series of invectives- “why did you take this tart in my house…who is this whore? Don’t you know that we never bring tarts in the house…not since your mother died…?”

The last assertion is even more troubling, suggesting that he even considered his late wife a woman of immoral character, although in later recollections from the past, he has kind- or at least ambiguous- words about his dead spouse, who taught her children all they know about morality- which could be interpreted as another insult, if not criticism, given the state in which these men are.
A coup de theater comes when the doctor in philosophy prepares to return to America, after showing how arrogant, pretentious he can be, when Ruth asks if his relatives have had the chance to get acquainted with his criticism work and he replies that they would not understand a thing, he is the one able to work “On” and not “In” these deep things.

It could be shot at critics, who are shallow – even so rotten as to push their wives into sex work? - but it is hard to be sure, one of the strong points of Homecoming might be that it provokes listeners or viewers to make their own minds, interpret the outré and outrageous in their own way and find a reason where one seems to be lacking and make sense of the insensible.
Max wants to keep his daughter-in-law, whereas when he has first seen her, he wanted her out, for some money, the plan appears to be to use her as a sex companion for the boxer son and eventually the others, and then Lenny proposes that she works as a prostitute.

Even more absurd and unintelligible, Ruth appears to agree with this preposterous project, provided she would have three rooms, bedroom, sitting and rest rooms, a contract signed and all the amenities and things she wants.
It is up to the public to interpret all this- decadence (?) The destruction of morals, fabric of postmodern society? Armageddon brought about by loss of meaning, guidance…