The Homecoming

Lenny is the middle child of Max’s three sons and in his early thirties. He often treats his father with disdain, as when he insults his father’s cooking and scoffs at his racing tips in Act I, Scene 1. Lenny is cruel to others too, boasting to Ruth about his violent treatment of women, including a sex worker and an old woman who asked for his help moving a mangle.

Perhaps partially explaining this violence towards women, Lenny reveals in the second act that he is a pimp with several women working for him in Soho: “I’ve got a number of flats all around [Greek Street]” he says (72), as the family plots the same fate for Ruth. Lenny’s exploitative nature is rewarded when Ruth accepts the plan devised for her, and with Joey’s help, Lenny usurps Max as the family’s leader. This says something about Pinter’s perception of 1960s Britain and the kind of people prospering in it: Lenny is an entirely cynical new breed.

Ian Holm played Lenny in the original London production.

Teddy is the family’s prodigal son. The oldest of Max’s three sons (and in his mid-thirties), he left England for the US six years previously with his new wife, Ruth, in tow. Although it is not specified where in the US he now lives, he has met with academic success there, finishing a doctorate and publishing numerous critical articles.

Teddy has returned to London with Ruth for a surprise visit to his family, having just visited Venice on vacation. What he finds in the North London home could not be further from the genteel life he leads in America. In the absence of his dead mother, Jessie, the family has become a node of masculine impulses, many of them toxic. His introduction of Ruth to this milieu proves the undoing of his own family. Teddy surrenders Ruth to his father, uncle, and brothers, ultimately leaving his own three sons in America bereft of a mother. The Homecoming ends with his exit and Ruth staying in London, suggesting that Teddy’s three sons may end up mirroring Teddy, Lenny, and Joey as they grow up.

Teddy’s story is essentially one of social mobility, represented not only by his move to a country mythologized as a land of opportunity but also by his intellectual profession. His return to his childhood home risks sucking him back into a realm he thought he had escaped, and he succumbs to its depravity in trading away his wife to make good his escape for a second time.

Michael Bryant played Teddy in the original production.

Ruth is Teddy’s wife and in her early thirties. She married Teddy somewhat secretly before he left for the US, but it is unclear if she herself is British or American. Nonetheless, Ruth has built an outwardly happy life in America, where she has birthed and raised the couple’s three children. She even helps Teddy with tasks related to his job, like organizing his lecture notes. As Teddy says of her, “She’s a great help to me over there. She’s a wonderful wife and mother. She’s a very popular woman” (50).

However, something is gnawing at Ruth. From the moment she and Teddy arrive at the house, she seems to be out of sync with her husband: He wants her to go to bed, but she wants to stroll, and so on. She seems no longer bound to Teddy in the way a partner might be, following her own instincts throughout. This leads to some shocking moments—for example, her casual reaction to Lenny’s violent anecdotes, none of which deter her from flirting with him and Joey or ultimately from abandoning her own family to fill the void in the London household.

This portrayal might not seem wholly realistic, but Pinter uses Ruth to explore ideas about agency. Ruth surprises the men throughout the play by finding agency when they expect her to submit to male desires. In Act I, she turns the tables on Lenny, riling him when she suggests he lie on his back while she pours water in his mouth—a position with sexual, but more specifically passive and feminized, connotations. In the second act, she stuns Max by embracing her planned exploitation. To what extent these ideas might read as feminist is debatable, but they reflect the evolving sexual mores of the 1960s and illustrate one of the societal factors that might be contributing to the crisis of masculinity The Homecoming’s men face.

Vivien Merchant played Ruth in the original production.

Joey is the youngest of the three brothers (i.e., Max’s sons), a demolition worker and would-be boxer in his mid-twenties. He is a taciturn character compared to Lenny and seems less intelligent than his brothers and father. However, this lends to the pathos of his relationship with Ruth over the course of the play.

Joey, as the youngest, seems to be the son most affected by Jessie’s absence. Rather than receiving what Max, at least, describes as Jessie’s moral instruction, Joey has been brought up and influenced by Lenny and (especially) Max. They take pride in having made a brute of him, as they show when they recount a tale of his cavorting with a sex worker and forcing unprotected sex on her. This kind of performance belies what Joey seems to most need: a mother rather than a lover.

He spends two hours alone with Ruth, in what the other men assume will be an opportunity for sex with her. When he says he didn’t have sex with her, the others immediately jump to the conclusion that Ruth is at fault—that she is a “tease.” What goes unspoken is that Joey might not have needed sex as much as simple affection or advice or nurturing. Joey does not correct the others, perhaps ashamed that he has not lived up to his macho image or his family’s expectations of how he should treat or interact with women. However, he does defend Ruth and seems satisfied that she will stay.

Terence Rigby played Joey in the original production.