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The Play. The Homecoming begins in the evening of an apparently normal working day. Max and Lenny are sitting in the large, slumlike living room in North London, which is the realistic setting for ...
- Teaching Guide
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- Essays and Criticism
The Homecoming shows men and women deeply divided. The men...
- Teaching Guide
The Homecoming shows men and women deeply divided. The men are all dogs, a woman's worst nightmare of what men might be. Max growls like a dog; his son says they eat like dogs, they boast of ...
- Characters and Their History
- A Power Drink
- It's All About Context
- Ruth
- Further Reading and Film Links
- Comments
The play takes place in a house of four very strong-willed and often violent men. Max is the father of the three boys, Lenny, Sam, and Joey, and the family's patriarch. Lenny is extremely violent, and it's suggested that he is a pimp. Sam is a driver for a well-established car service company. Joey has an interest in boxing and works in demolition....
Power is the most important theme throughout the play, and all characters try to exert their power over the others in various ways. They fight each other, verbally abuse each other, and attempt to outsmart one another. The men in the house consider violence the most important instrument of power and are physically and verbally abusive toward all wo...
In order to truly analyse and understand this sequence, we need to look at the context of the scene. Of all the factors that affect the outcome of the scene, Lenny’s attitude towards Ruth is the most convoluted. The ‘Homecoming’ Pinter is describing is Ruth's, not Teddy's. It may be Lenny’s emotions towards his mother that ignite his violent feelin...
Throughout the play, the acting out of dominance is part of a struggle for territory, and with the introduction of Ruth (and the fact that she is perceived as something the men can possess), the men feel the need to gain control over her as soon as possible so they can ultimately ‘own’ her and be seen as the 'man' of the house. Ruth uses her sexual...
Amman Shoaibon May 12, 2019: This analysis is very good as well as helpful. glad to have this kind of analysis. By the way, there is one mistake too that Sam is Max's brother, he is not his son. the third son of Max is Teddy. Carol Furtadoon March 26, 2018: She never passed over deeon January 21, 2018: ignoring that one mistake in the beginning, I ...
The Homecoming has an apparently simple plot, yet it is a text which resists closure and elevates psychological ambiguity to the status of great art. Cite this page as follows: "The Homecoming ...
They reigned in London throughout the 1950’s-70’s due to the power they derived from fear. Conflict: Honest vs. Corrupt A battle between corruption and honesty is continuous throughout the plot of The Homecoming . This can be clearly seen in the family’s mob connection. One example of this is Lenny’s past in the mob business.
For example, the opening scene of Act II might come from a “drawing room” comedy—those polite, witty staples of British theatre for decades before Pinter. In The Homecoming the family is having after-dinner coffee and the chit-chat about family life and Max’s late wife, Jessie, is quickly recognized as hypocritical sentimentality to the point of parody.
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