Plays by Harold Pinter (Book Guide): The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Comedy of menace, No Mans Land, Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter, Ashes to Ashes, The Room, Old Times, Remembrance of Things Past, The Hothouse, Victoria Station, Tea Party,

Source: Wikipedia. Commentary (plays not included). Pages: 39. Chapters: The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Comedy of menace, No Man's Land, Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter, Ashes to Ashes, The Room, Old Times, Remembrance of Things Past, The Hothouse, Victoria Station, Tea Party, Family Voices, The Collection, Night, Mountain Language, The Basement, Moonlight, Landscape, Pinter's People, The Tragedy of King Lear, A Kind of Alaska, Applicant, Celebration, A Slight Ache, A Night Out, The Lover, Silence, Precisely. Excerpt: The Homecoming is a two-act play written in 1964 by Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter, and first published in 1965. The original Broadway production won the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play and its 40th-anniversary Broadway production at the Cort Theatre was nominated for a 2008 Tony Award for "Best Revival of a Play". Set in North London, the play has six characters: five men who are related¿Max, a retired butcher, and Sam, a chauffeur, who are brothers; and Max's three sons, Teddy, an expatriate American philosophy professor; Lenny, who appears to be a pimp; and Joey, a would-be boxer in training who works in demolition; and one woman, Ruth, Teddy's wife. The play concerns Teddy's and Ruth's "homecoming," which has distinctly different symbolic and thematic implications. Considering the play while surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of its 40-anniversary production at the Cort Theatre, in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr writes: "'The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes" ("Demolition Man"). MAX, a man of seventyLENNY, a man in his early thirtiesSAM, a man of sixty-threeJOEY, a man in his middle twentiesTEDDY, a man in his middle thirtiesRUTH, a woman in her early thirties Pinter's text of The Homecoming describes the setting for the play as follows: 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. Much sexual tension occurs as Ruth teases Teddy's brothers and father and the men taunt one another in an Oedipal game of oneupmanship, resulting in Ruth's staying b