| Abstrakt: |
In creator Harold Pinter's most recent play, The Homecoming, several male members of a family struggle for power over each other and maneuver to win the favors of the sole woman in their midst. Their tactics, more direct than the behavior one usually encounter in everyday life, seem to be a quintessence of familiar attitudes and actions. What is usually buried, here emerges, distilled, to the surface. Included in this distillation is a demonstration of the human being in the role of human animal. While The Homecoming dramatizes a struggle for power and for sexual mastery in what might be called a "civilized jungle," the adjective "civilized" does not wholly modify the noun's implication of primitive and elemental urges, which underlie the characters' behavior. Pinter presents a cluster of interwoven images: battles for power among human animals, mating rites, and a dominant wife-mother in a den of sexually maladjusted males. The various repetitions and patterns of The Homecoming convey a vividly theatrical image of lust and power, and of lust used for power. Partly because of the consistent coupling of characters, with members of different generations in each of the four pairs, impressions of continuity and permanence are created. |
