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    Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter
    Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter
    Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter
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    Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInfluence Publishers
    Release dateJul 17, 2020
    ISBN9781645421818
    Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter
    Author

    Intelligent Education

    Intelligent Education is a learning company with a mission to publish accessible resources and digital tools to educate the world. Their mission drives every project, from publishing books to designing software and online courses, film projects, mobile apps, VR/AR learning tools and more. IE builds tools to empower people who love to learn. Intelligent Education offers courses in science, mathematics, the arts, humanities, history and language arts taught by leading university professors from Wake Forest University, Indiana University, Texas A&M University, and other great schools. The learning platform features 3D models and 360 media paired with instructional videos for on-screen and Mixed Reality interaction that increases student engagement and improves retention. The IE team is geographically located across the United States and is a division of Academic Influence. Learn more at http://intelligent.education.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide to The Homecoming and Other Works by Harold Pinter - Intelligent Education

      INTRODUCTION TO HAROLD PINTER

      When Harold Pinter began his career as a dramatist in 1957, writing The Room at the request of a friend, he was a little-known actor in a touring repertory company. Nine years later he had been critically acclaimed the most original, disturbing, and arresting talent in theatrical London by the London Sunday Times and called the most consistently successful serious dramatist of his generation, considered not only the most inescapably haunting of our modern dramatists, but the most likely to survive as a permanent part of our dramatic literature, by the English critic John Russell Taylor. Pinter’s dramas have received numerous awards, including the New York Critics’ Antoinette Perry Award for the Best Broadway Drama of 1967 for The Homecoming, and Pinter himself was awarded the Order of the British Empire on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1966.

      FAMILY AND EARLY LIFE

      Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 in the Hackney section of inelegant East London. The only son of a Jewish tailor (questionably of Portuguese ancestry), the future playwright grew up in a world filled with vivid tales of the treatment of Jews in Hitler’s Germany and literally had to fight his way home through gangs of young toughs during the post-war rise of neo-Nazism in England. The ever present aura of fear which he lived with became a basic element in his writing in later years.

      SCHOOLING

      Pinter won a scholarship to a local grammar school, Hackney Downs, where he was educated. His first experience with the theatre was seeing Sir Donald Wolfit in King Lear. In 1948 he entered the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but did not find it to his taste, so he faked a nervous breakdown and left the Academy. He also stood two trials as a conscientious objector for refusing to join the National Service, for which he was fined a total of thirty pounds, the sum being paid by his parents.

      ACTING CAREER

      In 1949 Pinter began an eight year career as a repertory actor, travelling throughout Britain under the stage name of David Baron. During this time he spent eighteen months in Ireland with Andrew McMaster’s touring company (fondly remembered in Pinter’s Mac) and married the excellent British actress Vivien Merchant (1956). The couple have one child, a son, Daniel.

      OVERVIEW OF PINTER’S WORKS

      Pinter’s plays compose a whole, each drama growing out of those which preceded it and leading into those which follow. A quick overview of his writing clearly shows his evolution as a dramatist from his earliest complete piece, The Room, which contains all of the elements to be found in his subsequent work, to The Homecoming, his latest major play and his best, in terms of both idea content and technique, as well as his most representative endeavor. Moreover, there is a discernible pattern which can be traced in Pinter’s dramas, as he moves from discussing menace per se in the early plays to examining the source of that menace in his later plays.

      THE COMEDIES OF MENACE

      The first three plays, The Room, The Birthday Party, and The Dumb Waiter, collectively titled comedies of menace, are essentially concerned with exposing the existence of personal menace in the world and charting the individuals destruction under the pressure of that menace. Problems in communication between individuals and the perception of reality (see the discussion of verification below) confront the characters in these early plays as they face omnipresent physical menace of undefined origin. One is reminded of the fear the author carried with him as a youth.

      In The Room the menace merely exists, and the audience never finds out why - they are only presented with Rose’s terror. The Birthday Party implies that society might be the source of menace, but nevertheless it is the menace and its effect which are important, not its derivation. The Dumb Waiter rounds out the picture of menace when the menacers are shown to be as susceptible to menace as those they terrorize.

      PLAYS IN TRANSITION

      The next two plays, A Slight Ache and The Caretaker, mark a shift in Pinter’s emphasis as he begins to focus on the cause of menace rather than on the existence of menace itself. The actual shift involved is really quite simple. In A Slight Ache Pinter determines that the menace is not an external source which threatens a man and his wife, but an internal ingredient, based on the psychological needs of the individuals involved. In The Caretaker, Pinter’s tale of two brothers and a tramp, psychological need as a motivating force is related to the actions of the characters.

      THE LATER PLAYS

      The Collection, The Lover, and The Homecoming continue the pattern begun with A Slight Ache and The Caretaker, as the dramatist extends his study of the origin of menace in psychological needs and demonstrates the drastic extents to which people will go in trying to satisfy their needs.

      THE MAJOR WORKS

      Introduction

      In order to understand The Homecoming it is useful to survey Pinter’s other works, for through them we can trace the thematic evolution which led to The Homecoming. The themes dramatist utilizes in this play are present from the very beginning (though they vary in the degree to which he has developed them from play to play).

      Some reviewers, especially the early ones, have complained about the difficulty in understanding Pinter, but often the difficulty was a result of unfamiliarity with either the playwright’s ideas, or his mode of expression, or both. Once again it is sometimes helpful to review the earlier plays, since many of them treat the same subjects in a more obvious manner, and it is always easier to find something if we know what we are looking for and have seen it before.

      From the opening lines of The Room to the final curtain of Pinter’s latest play, there are three concepts which to some degree lie behind each of the author’s dramas. These three interrelated concepts-menace, communication, and verification -create the basic meaning of every Pinter work from the outset and serve simultaneously as both subjects and techniques in those works. Thus it is imperative to understand how Pinter defines each of these terms and then how he utilizes these concepts in his writing.

      Essentially, every Pinter play can be seen as dealing with the three fundamental concepts in the following circular pattern. Menace exists, a priori. Because of the existence of menace there is a need for individuals to communicate with one another in order to gain reassurance, but the menace interferes and communication breaks down; or the individuals involved refuse to communicate for fear of exposing themselves to further menace. Lack of communication, therefore, ironically creates further menace. Because of the existence of menace there is also a need to verify things, to determine reality in other words. Unfortunately, menace again interferes and verification is hindered. The breakdown of communications further frustrates efforts to verify, and once more, additional menace is the result-which in turn produces a need for more communication and more verification, which cannot be met, reenforcing the menace, etc., etc. Menace Seldom defined in Pinter, menace is a threat to the status quo. Whereas in the early plays the threat is physical, it becomes progressively more psychological in nature in the succeeding dramas.

      Menace, of course, comprises the subject matter of all the plays to some extent, whether it is the study of Rose’s breakdown before the unknown horror represented by the basement in The Room, or Teddy’s refusal to become emotionally involved with other human beings in The Homecoming because he fears that he will be rejected.

      As a technique, Pinter relies on creating a mood of menace which carries the plot forward while at the same time it involves the audience with the suggestion that they are just as vulnerable to the terror embodied on stage as the characters are. The mood is neither surrealistic nor unfamiliar to the audience, for as Pinter claims in a March 3, 1960 B.B.C. European Service interview: This thing, of people arriving at the door [unannounced, bringing terror with them], has been happening in Europe in the last twenty years. Not only the last twenty years, the last two to three hundred.

      Communication

      Pinter has specifically stated how and why he explores human failure in communications. In Between the Lines, an article he wrote for the London Sunday Times in 1962, he explains his understanding of the functions of language and paralanguage. Quite obviously, according to Pinter, language is used to communicate; but it is also, and just as importantly, used for non-communication. In expanding on this idea, Pinter notes that language is a highly ambiguous commerce. So often, below the words spoken, is the thing known and unspoken.

      To the playwright’s mind this realization leads to an observation about the two sorts of silence which can occur in speech:

      There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language

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