John Russell Taylor's revierw of The Homecoming was published in the TLS of July 1, 1965.

Harold Pinter's new play is a homecoming in more ways than one. The most meticulously logical and consistent of dramatists in his development from one play to the next, he had seemed, in the plays since his last full-length theatrical play The Caretaker, to be working himself into a sort of logical impasse. The basic subject of these later plays was made explicit in his strange and haunting radio play The Dwarfs, in which at one point a character says:

Occasionally I believe I perceive a little of what you are, but that's pure accident. Pure accident on both our parts, the perceived and the perceiver. It's nothing like an accident, it's deliberate, it's a joint pretence. We depend on these accidents, on these contrived accidents to continue.

Precisely. In a world where everybody is the sum of so many reflections, where nobody is the same even to himself (supposing that means anything) for two seconds together, and where nobody can be sure even of accurately perceiving what anyone else may be at any given moment, we depend on the joint pretence that people have some sort of underlying consistency, and that perceptions can at least to some extent be relied on. in order to continue living at all. And writing plays, for if the joint pretence is shattered, how shall the dramatist hope to shape or make sense of his material? Both The Collection and The Lover (and, in an extreme form. Mr. Pinter's unpublished film script The Compartment) grapple with this problem, but in them any recognizable reality seems to be dissolving before our eyes.

What, then, could come next but silence? What did come next is Mr. Pinter's most recent television play Tea Party, in which a withdrawal from the extreme position of the plays which preceded it is actually dramatized. In Tea Party the central character suffers from perceiving the frailty of the joint pretence: is his wife's brother in fact her lover, or both, or neither? Were they brought up where and how they say they were, or not, or both yes and no? We start with him, and up to a certain point in the play we see things through his eyes. But then we come gradually to appreciate that he is in fact going mad: that is, that what we are seeing is not necessarily to be taken as an image of the world as it is, but simply as one man's increasingly demented view of it. The two viewpoints fight it out during the climactic teaparty. when the central character's view of it and our "objective" view are intercut, until finally the objective wins out and we are left decisively outside the character, in objective reality, looking at him in a state of complete trance, unseeing, unhearing, paralysed (literally) by his own inability to make sense of the world around him.

So now The Homecoming brings us a new, reintegrated Pinter. It is not a comedy of menace, and there are no real mysteries: some critics have wondered whether the whole background the homecomer, Teddy, provides for himself – family, plush job teaching philosophy in an American university – is not a fiction, but the text seems to offer no solid reason why we should not take it at its face value. It is a play about six people in a room just as The Caretaker was, in Mr. Pinter's own words, "about three people in a room". They are mostly pretty alarming people, it is true: alarming as much as anything because they are taken so coolly for granted. The play is primarily about a struggle for power involving three groups: the three who act (Teddy's father, Max, and his brothers Lenny and Joey), the two who think (Teddv and his uncle Sam) and the solitary woman, Teddy's wife, Ruth, who like most of Pinter's women does not make, or permit us to make, any distinction between thought and action. The thinkers are overwhelmed – of course – by those who act, since words and arguments are no weapons to use against bulldozers. But those who live in their bodies, by instinct, at the expense of their minds, are overruled by the woman, who does not fight for power, but just assumes it. She is at once a cat (catlike, that is, not catty) and a creature from another planet: she has been, we gather, a model, in the loosest sense of the term: she has taken on respectability and no doubt been a model wife and mother for just as long as it suited her: and now she is ready without a glance behind to become a prostitute again, provided only it is on her terms. The logic of the struggle is impeccable, the theatrical force of Mr. Pinter's dialogue as unarguable as ever. It is a play we could easily dislike, but not possibly ignore. And it leaves us asking, yet again, whatever will Mr. Pinter do next? The possibilities are limitless.

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