About the Play:

The Homecoming was one of Royal National Theatre of Britain's top 100 plays of the 20th century.

The Homecoming has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues.

The Homecoming is a full-length drama by Nobel prize-winner Harold Pinter. In the play, Teddy brings home his attractive new wife Ruth to meet his family-made up entirely of men. When the boys try to assert their authority over Ruth, she turns the tables on them with outrageous consequences in a darkly sexual comedy that challenges expectations of power and gender – and shows us that people are seldom what they appear.

The Homecoming is regarded by some critics as Harold Pinter's masterpiece. In an old and slightly seedy house in North London there lives a family of men: Max, the crude patriarch, his ineffectual brother Sam and two of Max's three sons, both unmarried – Lenny, a small-time pimp and Joey, a boxer who works in demolition. Into this sinister abode comes the eldest son Teddy, now a successful professor of philosophy in America. After nine years abroad, Teddy brings his wife of six years Ruth, to meet the family for the first time. But things don't go exactly as planned. As his foul-mouthed father and low-life brothers battle to impress her, Ruth appears to find herself strangely at home and Teddy's grip on her loosens. In the style that became a trademark, Harold Pinter creates mounting tension, with insidiously bizarre accusations and proposals by the men to Ruth, and The Homecoming gives way to an ominous game of cat and mice.

The Homecoming premiered in 1965 at the Aldwych Theatre in the West End of London under the direction of Sir Peter Hall. It transferred in 1967 to The Music Box Theatre on Broadway and won the New York Critics' Award for Best Play of the Year. The show enjoyed revivals on Broadway and in the West End and has become a popular choice for fringe festivals and community theatre productions.

Cast: 1 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Forty years after its Broadway debut titillated and outraged American theatergoers, this Harold Pinter masterpiece of family warfare continues to unsettle ... like most great art The Homecoming operates on a mythic as well as an immediate level. It insists that some shadowy part of you is part of it. It burrows under you skin and festers." — New York Times

"Bizarre, ominous and taunting ... A steadily absorbing, tantalizing and disturbing theatrical adventure. Enthralling." — New York Post

"It is a classic study of macho rivalry – a testosterone stand-off among a Jewish family in an unspecified quarter of East London ... Pinter's theme is the petty but menacing games of vindictive one-upmanship men can get up to when left on their own – especially when there's a woman at stake." — Daily Mail (London)

"Pinter's play operates on any number of levels; as realistic drama, family comedy and mythical study of female empowerment." — The Guardian (London)

"This is one of Pinter's greatest plays. It is about men who were born into an oppressively claustrophobic family culture but who are both motherless and fatherless." — The Sunday Times (London)

"An exultant night – a man in total command of his talent." — Observer (London)

"The most intense expression of compressed violence to be found anywhere in Pinter's plays." — The Times (London)

About the Playwright:

Harold Pinter (1930-2008) was an English playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, poet, and Nobel laureate. He wrote 29 plays including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, and Betrayal, 15 dramatic sketches, 21 screenplays, as well as books of poetry and fiction, and directed 27 theatre productions. He continued to act under his own name, on stage and screen. His genius was recognized within his lifetime as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 (the highest honour available to any writer in the world), the Companion of Honour for services to Literature, the Legion D'Honneur, the European Theatre Prize, the Laurence Olivier Award and the Moliere D'Honneur for lifetime achievement. In 1999 he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, in addition to 18 other honorary degrees.