On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel The action of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, as produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Music Box) looks simple. Teddy, a Londoner by birth, has been teaching...
...But the injuries have no obvious motive...
...The act of recognition becomes anything but "cathartic...
...Beyond the squared-off arch that gives access to the room a staircase mounts to the source of the play's unrest, the bedrooms...
...And of course you'd be in a position to give them inside information...
...Freud was perhaps accustomed to seeing people "moved" by the older type of play in which their fears were hinted at...
...The father calls his dead wife "a woman with a will of iron, a heart of gold, and a mind...
...his two younger brothers, Lenny a pimp who punches his girls about and gives them "a turn of the boot," and Joey ("I'm a boxer...
...it resides in the formal precision of his dialogue, the calculated rhythm of the repetitions between those moats of silence that isolate and elevate each line...
...A closing variation is sounded when we learn that Teddy's mother had been "had" in the back seat of his uncle's car by his father's best friend...
...But the discovery does not stop the old boy from inquiring whether Teddy's sons "would like a photo of their grandfather...
...Since it is both farcical and melodramatic, a more rewarding guide is the chapters on melodrama and farce in Eric Bentley's The Life of the Drama...
...at the same time he is afraid the friends will walk out on him...
...They recognize it as their own...
...Menace and Metaphysical Mystery...
...There are four "quiet" roles...
...and the next instant refers to her as a "slutbitch...
...In each beat of each scene there is stiffness, followed by relaxation, followed by a gathering of forces...
...The operative figures in the nightmare are relatives, supposed friends of relatives, rivals????takers all...
...He functions in a terrain that reason does not understand...
...The five men, dressed in different shades of gray, hunch over a match, taking its flame for their after-dinner cigars, then disperse like an opening flower and give off a pollen of smoke...
...Teddy, a Londoner by birth, has been teaching philosophy at a university in the States...
...He may seek and find a motive, out of his torment: an imagined insult to somebody, an accidental crossing of another person's wishes, an unmeant infraction of another's property...
...We might as well ask why a man does not govern his behavior in his dreams...
...So it is, except in a nightmare...
...In the evenings, after work...
...The playwright's dreads come forth to challenge his "hero," an incarnation of himself...
...Not dreams like Strindberg's To Damascus, The Ghost Sonata and A Dream Play, which are torn whole and quivering out of the unconscious, but portraits of fears that casually surface and take on an uncanny semblance of reality...
...A wife for a cheese roll...
...they humiliate him...
...The situation is farcical but not removed to the usual safe distance...
...But the motive is inadvertent, trivial, ridiculous...
...Like much postwar drama it will be????already has been????explained away as Absurdity, Anti-logic, The Impossibility of Communication, the Theaters of Cruelty...
...Her parting line as he goes back to their three small sons in the U.S...
...He may even bow to that motive and so justify in a fashion what is being done to him...
...And in The Dwarfs one character is afraid of being exploited by his friends...
...Into the slang speeches, especially those of Lenny the pimp, he spills lower middle-class politenesses, the respectable, semi-literacy of a London clerk or bank teller who relishes the unusual word as he stumbles on it...
...Dreams articulated are the soul of Pinter's writing...
...Lenny describes lovingly how he cut the roll, put butter on it, sliced a piece of cheese, and so forth...
...In place of the commercial daydream-plays of affluence and ease, popularity and sexual go, Pinter (following Beckett, Adamov, Genet and Ionesco) dramatizes nightmares, the dread of death or of life in a dead world, a morgue in movement, the snatching away of somebody precious or of a characteristic (sanity, satisfaction, reputation) that is essential if one is really to live...
...Nearly all of Pinter's work enacts a particular type of fear, the dread of being deprived of something we cherish-????a wife, honor, a limb, a place in life (a sense of independence...
...The formality of the text is partnered by the formality of Peter Hall's staging, with its decisive striding through the emptiness of John Bury's set and its thoughtful, matched gestures...
...As the wife, Vivien Merchant (Mrs...
...during the latter moments whenever an actor approaches another one can almost smell the danger...
...In The Room the woman Rose dreads being ousted from the room, her haven...
...is, "Don't become a stranger...
...in The Collection, too, to a homosexual...
...They rob him...
...his uncle, an unmarried chauffeur...
...George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly did it in Beggar on Horseback over 40 years ago, though pretty clumsily...
...He then caps his impudence by suggesting that Teddy send back customers to his wife from the States, "professors, heads of departments, men like that...
...Thus, some playgoers were baffled by the scene in The Homecoming in which Teddy eats a sandwich his brother had made for himself...
...Michael Craig plays Teddy, the hero-prey, with dazed reserve, taking emotional cover behind his American-looking glasses...
...No writer in English has brought off this colloquial poetry so well since Eliot in Sweeney Agonistes...
...Another puzzle is Teddy's refusal to assert his rights...
...they are shaken...
...We may see a better performance than Holm's, just as we may go to a more gruelling modern play than The Homecoming...
...Lenny is the ultimate menace in the story, and Holm (whom I last saw as the lead in the Royal Shakespeare Company's deflation of Henry V) takes charge of the nightmare's switchboard...
...Near the beginning, Teddy's father meets Ruth and takes her for a tart, which she is...
...Pinter seems to linger over this cheese roll for the sake of quick laughs...
...The cast moves through a dirty-green sepulchre of a room with a thin carpet lying at the center of its tiled floor...
...Pinter's gift is as much literary as dramatic...
...Stanley in The Birthday Party is interrogated, asked questions he cannot answer, and bodily stolen by two thugs...
...Rather than going into the matter of Teddy's illegitimacy, Pinter shrugs it off with a quick, wicked irony...
...Or something nice, like Cynthia...
...or tells how she walked up the driveway to a house and "the house was very light...
...in reading or in the theater) suppress the earnestness of the painful feeling...
...The old man is as much of a cuckold as his son????who may not in fact be his son...
...Bentley talks about the irrational fears that can be presented to us from a stage...
...That is why Teddy submits to a succession of other indignities, a set of impeccable variations on the main theme, and all arising from the same fears...
...The two brothers make love to Ruth in front of Teddy, persuade her to stay with them to cook and clean, and earn her keep on the side????that is, on the sidewalk in Soho...
...Why does he relinquish Ruth...
...John Normington and Terence Rigby are expertly withdrawn as the uncle and the athletic brother...
...The "painful feeling" of spectators at The Homecoming is not suppressed...
...In The Dumbwaiter Gus will lose the trust of his partner Ben for no reason that he knows, and he will be killed...
...In his acting, diabolism paces and shadows good-fellowship until he seems to be every great villain at once, from Aaron to Iago...
...The neutral fittings include an ancient sideboard and a floor lamp that sheds no light worth noticing...
...Lenny's motive is neither logical nor "anti-logical...
...one of the friends recounts a dream in which he saw people with their faces peeling off...
...I'm in demolition in the daytime...
...In a Slight Ache the husband loses his wife to a matchseller...
...He comes back to show his wife, Ruth, to his family, a mother-hungry household of men: his father, a Cockney despot...
...In Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex Freud remarks: "The sexually-exciting influence of some painful affects, such as fear, shuddering and horror is felt by ? great many people throughout life and readily explains why so many people seek opportunities to experience such sensations, provided that certain accessory circumstances (as...
...It sounds like an improbable exchange...
...Teddy leaves without a gripe and without his wife...
...As the father, a roaring ex-butcher of 70, Paul Rogers uses his arms like meat-axes and swings his big voice about the house...
...Pinter confronts them with a version of a nightmare...
...Pinter) lets go of the ends of some of her sentences, but effectively tantalizes the men with the mere, still presence of her body as she talks in sex symbols about a large white water tower, her legs, her lips, her underwear...
...Ian Holm portrays the other antagonist, Lenny, with a younger-brother deference that does not quite conceal absolute hatred...
...The contradictions are between what people say and what they think, only in Pinter, as in dreams, people utter thoughts...
...He is unwilled, unmanned...
...he puts his feelings on the block and defies anyone to wound them...
...Aston has part of his brain removed...
...He writes, ". . . 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself is not a cheering slogan because fear itself is the most indestructible of obstacles...
...At the end, Lenny is deciding on a trade name for her ("Dolores...
...But when...
...By consuming the roll Teddy revenges himself after his brother has fondled Ruth...
...In counter-revenge, Lenny takes Ruth over completely...
...Or Gillian...
...The play (Grove Press) parodies all those wet stories about sentimental homecomings...
...Now, any competent dramatist can conjure up a nightmare of a sort...
...we may thrill vicariously to the fears from a safe Pinter's Nightmare distance (melodrama), or laugh at them because they are somebody else's (farce...
...In much the same way, there are contradictions in the evidence given...
...The tramp Davies in The Caretaker is driven out of his temporary refuge...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 3
