Word: pinter
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...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...
...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...
...Pinter and the Marx Brothers collaborated on a play, and dread and menace were laughing matters, Eh? might be the result. Dustin Hoffman is properly sinister and silly as Henry Livings' pop protagonist...
...movie, never mind the big budget and the famous names, is exactly what Memorandum is. The plot is generally aimless, the lines are merely cute. Incredible that it was written by one of Britain's most brilliant playwrights, Harold Pinter (The Caretaker, The Homecoming). Did he do it to make money? No doubt, but he also did it to make propaganda. Editing the facts of life in modern Germany to fit an evident prejudice, Pinter blandly but incessantly insinuates that all Germans are still Nazis at heart and can hardly wait to go to heil again...
...down England's temples of hypocrisy, pomposity, caste and class snobbery. Then anger turned to almost hysterical laughter: the acerb mocking tone one hears and the swinging London air one breathes in plays like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, A Severed Head, The Killing of Sister George, Eh?, and such Pinter one-acters as The Lover, A Slight Ache and The Collection. The latest comedy to rip the stuffing out of the stuffy is How's the World Treating You?, and it is desolatingly funny...