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.
Plot
After having lived in the United States for six years, Teddy brings his wife, Ruth, home for the first time to meet his working-class family in North London, where he grew up, and which she finds more familiar than their arid academic life in America. The two married in London before moving to the United States.
Much sexual tension occurs as Ruth teases Teddy's brothers and father, and the men taunt one another in a game of one-upmanship, resulting in Ruth's staying behind with Teddy's relatives as "one of the family" and Teddy returning home to their three sons in America without her.
Act one
The play begins in the midst of what becomes an ongoing power struggle between the two more dominant men: the father, Max, and his middle son, Lenny. Max and the other men put down one another, expressing their "feelings of resentment," with Max feminising his brother Sam, whom he intimates is homosexual, while, ironically, himself claiming to have himself "given birth" to his three sons.
Teddy arrives with his wife, Ruth. He reveals that he married Ruth in London six years earlier and that the couple subsequently moved to the U.S. and had three sons prior to this visit to the family home ("homecoming") to introduce her. The couple's mutual discomfort with each other, marked by her restless desire to go out exploring after he has gone to sleep, then followed by her sexually suggestive first-time encounter with her dangerous, and somewhat misogynistic, brother-in-law Lenny, begins to expose problems in the marriage. She strikes a nerve when she calls him "Leonard"; he tells her that no one, aside from his late mother, has ever called him that.
After a sexually charged conversation between Lenny and Ruth, she exits. Awakened by their voices, the patriarch Max comes downstairs. Lenny does not tell Max about Teddy and Ruth's arrival at the house and engages in more verbal sparring with Max. The scene ends in a blackout.
When the lights come up the scene has changed to the following morning. Max comes down to make breakfast. When Teddy and Ruth appear and Max discovers they have been there all night without his knowledge, Max is initially enraged, assuming that Ruth is a prostitute. After being told that Ruth and Teddy have married and that she is his daughter-in-law, Max appears to make some effort to reconcile with Teddy.
Act two
This act opens with the men's ritual of sharing the lighting of cigars, traditionally associated with phallic imagery after lunch. Teddy's cigar goes out prematurely, the symbolism of which is clear.
Max's subsequent sentimental pseudo-reminiscences of family life with his late wife, Jessie, and their "boys" and his experiences as a butcher also end abruptly with a cynical twist.