Word: pinter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...PINTER is a master of the language, no doubt about it. His lines operate on many levels-the one which the actors understand, the one the audience understands, and the one that only Pinter himself understands. When Max, the aged, mad and offensive old man in The Homecoming, berates his oldest son for bringing his wife into the house, saying, "I've never had a whore under this roof before, ever since your mother died," only Pinter knows how right...
Ruth is a whore, although the audience doesn't know it yet. The true import of Pinter's words, like the pronouncements of Cassandra, are never quite clear until the scene has been fully played out. The joke is on the actors, but also on the audience, for the broad one-liners always turn out to have a deeper meaning. This is the essence of Pinter: the audience snickers and chuckles its way through the play, only to realize at the end, that it was not funny...
...Homecoming is a brutal play. Pinter forces you to laugh at a group of people who are so miserable, so maladjusted, so sick, that they are grotesquely funny, Max, the retired butcher, is an ugly old lecher who retaliates for the abuse heaped on him by his wealthy pimp of a son by browbeating his wimpy brother, a sixty-three-year-old chauffeur. Into the mixture comes Teddy, Max's oldest son, a professor at an American university, who seems at first to be the only normal member of the family. But Teddy lets his wife go whoring with both...
Death is not, of course, a particularly original theme in this genre, but Orton doesn't strive for chills as Pinter did in Accident. Instead, he applies black humor within the blissfully sloppy and easy-going frame of character-types which are so familiar that they never really threaten to be ominous: The Sherlock Holmes sleuth who stalks, magnifying glass in hand, the unctuous undertaker who speaks of "floral tributes," the cool-as-ice nurse who hides a whopping sex drive. With characters such as these, each occupationally linked to death, but in funny, obsessive ways, Orton spins a yarn...
Grisly stuff, one might think, but not so, thanks to Pinter's sense of the ludicrous and his love of vaudeville and word juggling. While tickling the mind and prickling the skin, Pinter makes one giggle and gasp in the same breath...