{"id":27900,"date":"2006-03-29T12:56:00","date_gmt":"2006-03-29T12:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/?p=27900"},"modified":"2024-07-04T13:57:29","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T05:57:29","slug":"putting-the-ha-back-in-harold-pinter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/artikel\/2006\/03\/putting-the-ha-back-in-harold-pinter\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting the “Ha” Back in Harold Pinter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

The Homecoming<\/em>,\ntypical of Harold Pinter’s plays, starts out innocently enough, with a normal\ndomestic scene between an old man and his son. It is not long, however, before\nyou start realising that, as it is with life, what you see on the surface is\nnot all that it seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plot is simple: Max is a cranky\nelderly man who lives in a North London flat with two of his three sons (Lenny\nand Joey) and his younger brother Sam. One day, his eldest son Teddy comes home\nfrom America unexpectedly to visit with his wife, Ruth. Teddy’s return after six\nyears sets the stage for unnerving conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are many ways to\n“read” a Pinter play, as my lecturer used to say, and this is surely\nmine: The Homecoming<\/em> is a brilliant\nsnapshot of a world dictated by the whims of men, within which women are\nreduced to being nothing more than performers who, like it or not, end up\ndancing to the tune if they want to “succeed” or even simply to\nsurvive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having been raised by five women with\nan absent father-figure — and guided by an egalitarian Quran — this is not a world\nthat pleases me. This is why I had found The\nHomecoming<\/em> to be particularly profound and heart-rending; it encapsulates\nthe bitterness I feel about the way women are generally treated in my world.\nAnd it is why the major issue I have with Gavin Yap’s interpretation is that it\nall feels a bit like Harold Pinter Lite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of the four Pinter plays I had\nwatched as a student in the UK, The\nHomecoming<\/em> has always been the most disturbing. I remember that yes, it\nshared the same genesis as The Dumb\nWaiter<\/em>, The Caretake<\/em>r and The Birthday Party<\/em>, but it struck a\ndeeper truth in one who’s come from a staunchly patriarchal culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written in 1964, this play perhaps\nno longer resonates as much in the London of today, but — Islamic Family Law\nand all — it’s still very much relevant to Malaysian society at large, I\nsuspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the brooding tension\nthat is supposedly inherent in the characters doesn’t come across, nor does the\natmosphere unnerve you (love the lighting and crisp set design, though). In\nfact, the men do not offend and the sole woman is stifling a giggle at the most\ninopportune times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me state this clearly: the\nactors were, by and large, enjoyable enough. They took to their roles with\nglee, that much is apparent. But still…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenny (played by U-En Ng), the son\nwith a clearly criminal bent, did not terrify me with his suggested malevolence\n(although Ng’s was the most entertaining performance for me that night). The\ncranky Max (aka. Thor Kah Hoong), with his distractingly flitting accent that is\nsometimes British and sometimes not, didn’t rub me the wrong way. And Ian\nCheang’s Joey: why is he fluttering his eyelids like that? Isn’t he supposed to\nbe thuggish?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought Ben Tan was marvelous as\nthe hapless Teddy, who I’d imagine makes any woman want to throw vases and\nother potentially damaging objects at his head all the time. And Patrick Teoh\nwas good throughout as Sam (that moustache was a brilliant idea), except for\nthat — unintentionally? — comical fall at the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sole woman (Loo Jia Wei as Ruth,\nTeddy’s wife), while reasonably self-assured in her sexuality and the effect it\nwas having on the men (and audience), was perhaps too new to make a real impact\n— a couple of times you could see her struggling to stifle a giggle when the\nscene really could do without one from the woman at the centre of an\nintensifying power play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let me put it more simply: this\nperformance didn’t make me feel guilty about laughing out loud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means I had a rollicking good\ntime on Friday night, and if I had paid for my ticket I would have considered\nit money well spent. Yet I was not perturbed afterwards, which I should be. I\nwanted to go home to a warm blanket of melancholy, but I ended up feeling like\nI’d had a jolly good time indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This troubles me because the heart\nof a Pinter performance is that uneasiness you feel as you join a crowd in\nroyally laughing at the faults of others. This performance should make one feel\nlike being a coloured person joining in the racist taunts on the terraces of an\nEnglish football stadium, not a night out with the Instant Caf\u00e9 Theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was interesting to see that they\ndecided not to localise the play and kept the London setting, though they\ndidn’t go the whole hog and went all Cockney. This has its pros and cons, but\nmainly cons, in my opinion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thor’s undecided accent, for one.\nWhy didn’t they just make the patriarch a migrant from Asia with boys who had\ngrown up really Bri’ish? That would have gone some way to narrow the gap of\nrealism, perhaps. But then again, I always have this problem when watching\nBritish or American plays put on by, er, the natives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And perhaps it was also just\nwatching it with a Malaysian crowd, who — in my experience, at least — has a\ntendency to see boisterous fun in almost anything. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps:\nthat’s just the trouble with men, isn’t it — always trying to fix things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I’ll just leave it at that, and\nend with an encouragement for you to go see The\nHomecoming<\/em>. Be as it may, Pinter’s dialogue is still delightfully written\nand is best experienced when performed. Besides, when else will you get to see\nThor do the occasional Eric Idle impression, eh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Homecoming<\/em><\/strong> is happening at KLPac – Pentas 2 from Fri 24 Mar – Sun 2 Apr 2006. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

~~~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ruhayat X loves his mother who calls him once a fortnight and plies him with food that keeps him fat and juicy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First Published: 29.03.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Homecoming, typical of Harold Pinter’s plays, starts out innocently enough, with a normal domestic scene between an old man and his son. It is not long, however, before you start realising that, as it is with life, what you see on the surface is not all that it seems. The plot is simple: Max […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7758,7774,7762],"tags":[3344,654,742,4377,607,493,1173,244,49,46,687,1196],"writer":[7894],"class_list":["post-27900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artikel","category-ulasan","category-teater","tag-ben-tan","tag-gavin-yap","tag-harold-pinter","tag-ian-cheang","tag-instant-cafe-theatre","tag-klpac","tag-loo-jia-wei","tag-patrick-teoh","tag-review","tag-theatre","tag-thor-kah-hoong","tag-u-en-ng","writer-ruhayat-x-ms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39226,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27900\/revisions\/39226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27900"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}