MARSHALL COHEN
The company is attractive, but it does not compensate for the losses
suffered in translation. Gene Lindsey's performance not only captures,
it shares Sergius' callowness, and he is understandably shy about button–
holing the audience for no very good reason. As the movie queen Lulu
Meyers, Beverly Bentley offers a creditable imitation of Marilyn Monroe
as Lorelei Lee, but nothing more to the point. Hugh Marlowe misses
the streak of vulgarity and the impulsive vanity of Eitel, but he is suave
and possesses literary intelligence. It's not his fault that he can't lend
a conversational air to reflections like, "Where, in which cemetery of
the heavens, do the tender words of lovers rest when they love no
more?" Rosemary Tory's Elena is wonderfully vulnerable but Rip
Torn's Marion
is
only saturnine and troubled, where he ought to be
demonic and despairing. Will Lee, of course, has a minor triumph
punching out Teppis' wonderful one-liners. Perhaps he and Mailer
should think of reviving Minsky's.
Pinter possesses in a supreme degree that sense of the theatrical
medium Mailer so conspicuously lacks.
The Homecoming
is, in fact, an
austere esthetic exercise, an approach to "pure" theater. Pinter rejects
the grosser materials of his earlier plays, the poignant betrayals of
The Caretaker,
or the Hitchcockian bravura of
The Birthday Party,
and
works toward cooler, more formal effects.
The Homecoming
is a work
of great virtuosity and rhetorical brilliance, but it is also fragmentary,
evasive and often pointlessly paradoxical.
Teddy, an unphilosophical professor of philosophy at an American
university, brings his inscrutable wife Ruth-for no apparent reason–
to meet the exclusively male remnant of his North London family. His
father Max, who plays the role of mother, and his brothers Lenny, an
impotent pimp, and Joey, a sexually reluctant rapist, propose that Ruth
abandon her family and stay on as their whore. Ruth immediately
agrees and Teddy, urging her to keep in touch, withdraws without
protest. The North London atmosphere, and the Cockney speech of
Pinter's characters, invite us to put a realistic interpretation on these
events, and when this proves troublesome, to seek an "hypothesis" ex–
plaining their strangeness. Of course, no such account of the events
is forthcoming nor is there-as Ruth and Lenny warn us- any symbolic
"point." In his earlier plays Pinter raised and sustained the expectation
that there were such hypotheses and points. Who was the blind Negro?
What did Goldberg and McCann represent? Pinter made horrifying
suggestions and hinted at awful possibilities. The most straightforward
remarks were invested with frightful implications or made to look like
