Major Themes In Harold Pinter’s Play, The Home Coming

Abstract

The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Harold Pinter and first published in 1965. After having lived in the United States for several 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. Pinter’s plays are ambivalent in their plots, presentation of characters, and endings, but they are works of undeniable power and originality.The Homecoming focuses on the return to his London home of a university professor who brings his wife to meet his brothers and father. The woman’s presence exposes a tangle of rage and confused sexuality in this all male household, but in the end she decides to stay with the father and his two sons after having accepted their sexual overtures without protest from her overly detached husband. In this paper we propose to trace the various major themes of the play, The Home Coming.