Word: vivien
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...Pinter's Broadway play The Homecoming (TIME, Jan. 13). The drama is strictly Theater of the Absurd-opaque, funny here, touching there, deeply disturbing, and in sum the most compelling show in a dreary Broadway season. What helps make it so is the actress in the moving underwear, Vivien Merchant. She also happens to be the wife of Playwright Pinter and the woman who has helped make most of her husband's play come to life...
...Homecoming Vivien plays temptress and tigress, an enigmatic queen of the snarling jungle in her in-laws' house. Her hooded hazel eyes crinkle with bemusement, sag in boredom, flash with killing contempt or sexual electricity. Her fellow actors are all members in high standing of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, but it is Vivien who overpowers them all as the household whore-mother...
Breadwinner. Vivien's physical domination of the stage comes from matchless body control, the result of ballet training, which she began at the age of three with her mother, a dance teacher. She had no drama coaching except for elocution lessons to correct her Manchester accent. She met Pinter, who himself started as an actor, while touring the provinces with a Shakespearean troupe. Their marriage in 1956 gave Pinter a sure breadwinner in the house and enabled him to try playwriting. Today they own a splendid five-story Georgian town house overlooking Regent's Park in London...
...plot is as spare as the dialogue, and it never totally unravels. After six years of teaching at an American university, Teddy, a philosophy professor (Michael Craig), brings his wife (Vivien Merchant) back to North London to meet his widowed father, a bachelor uncle, and two younger brothers. An amoral crew with the ethics of asphalt-jungle cats, they live in "the land of no holds barred"-a grey, womanless room in a grey, womanless house. The father (Paul Rogers) is a bull walrus spuming through yellowed tusks against the dying of his authority. The older brother, Lenny (Ian Holm...
...cooking and cleaning up, Lenny for his stable of tarts, and Joey for lovemaking. But after the agreement, the old man is invaded by sheer panic: "She'll use us, she'll make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it!" Yet will she? Vivien Merchant ends her evocatively feminine performance with the elusive hint of a smile. The secret is as safe with her as with Mona Lisa...