Land of No Holds Barred

The Homecoming finds Harold Pinter playing his usual highly tantalizing game--show and don't tell. He unearths effects and buries causes, marks and mocks the absurdity of existence. Half through humor, half through shock, he detonates jagged fragments of the unconscious mind upon the stage. Innately primitive, Oedipal, conjugal, The Homecoming quivers with the enigmatic knowledge that while no one wins the war between the sexes, everyone is wounded. It is performed to ensemble perfection by the members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and it is directed with steely exactitude by Peter Hall. Although a trifle too trickish and studied to rank as Pinter's best work, it is quite good enough to dominate the Broadway scene, and probably will not be surpassed in dramatic quality this season.

The plot is as spare as the dialogue, and it never totally unravels. After six years of teaching at an American university, Teddy, a philosophy professor (Michael Craig), brings his wife (Vivien Merchant) back to North London to meet his widowed father, a bachelor uncle, and two younger brothers. An amoral crew with the ethics of asphalt-jungle cats, they live in "the land of no holds barred"--a grey, womanless room in a grey, womanless house. The father (Paul Rogers) is a bull walrus spuming through yellowed tusks against the dying of his authority. The older brother, Lenny (Ian Holm), is a dapper spiv of a pimp with a lively, corrupt intelligence. Joey (Terence Rigby), the younger, is a dub of a prizefighter, a would-be champion with a chimpanzee brain.

To Teddy, the academic philosopher, they are a dreadful lot ("You're just objects"), and his devotion to "intellectual equilibrium" is his defense against their chaotic passions. His wife Ruth--provocatively passive, a lazy stick of dynamite waiting for the grasping hands of violent men--is oddly, if languidly, fascinated by this menage. Even though she has three sons of her own, it is obvious that her husband's emotional aridity has left her sexually parched. "Oh, I was thirsty," she says, as she drains a glass of water in some seductive byplay with Brother Lenny. Soon Lenny is brushing her face with kisses. "She's wide open," observes Brother Joey, taking over the love play on sofa and floor. All this happens in front of Teddy, who inexplicably makes no gesture of protest. He still maintains his deadpan cool when his father and brothers propose that Ruth stay on and earn her keep by working for them as a part-time whore. She agrees, her husband leaves, and at play's end the white-maned patriarch of the clan is sobbing at her feet, begging for a kiss.

Pinter always raises more questions than he answers, and sometimes the questions are unanswerable. Baffling the intellect while it stirs the instincts, The Homecoming operates in the realm of myth. Myth frequently proclaims the dark primacy of what D. H. Lawrence called "the blood consciousness" over the light of reason, clearly one of Pinter's intentions in this play. The dead mother plays a significant role in The Homecoming: she, like Ruth, was something of a slut. Thus the Oedipal shift of sexual power that takes place results in the overthrow of the two father figures--the old man and Teddy--with the two younger brothers taking possession of the slut-mother. That downfall is what gives peculiar pathos to the old man as he pleads for a kiss.

But how is one to understand Ruth's agreeing to the family's bizarre proposition? Only psychological speculation will help. It may be that Teddy unwittingly sought out the slut-mother in marrying Ruth, and when he introduced her to his ancestral home she intuitively found it irresistible. The play's ultimate ambiguity, which centers on the question of who uses whom in the man-woman relationship, can never be resolved. At first glance, Ruth seems exploited. The old man plans to use her for cooking and cleaning up, Lenny for his stable of tarts, and Joey for lovemaking. But after the agreement, the old man is invaded by sheer panic: "She'll use us, she'll make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it!" Yet will she? Vivien Merchant ends her evocatively feminine performance with the elusive hint of a smile. The secret is as safe with her as with Mona Lisa.

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