Troubling. Not a sympathetic character in the lot. ( )

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. ( )