appear more realistic and more relevant to the lives of theatre audiences than it may have seemed when they themselves were younger or more naive about the nature of marriage and family life. To those with strong religious values, like Hobson, the play appears, to say the least, immoral or amoral. Yet, to others, its moral value resides in its very questioning of commonly accepted shibboleths about marriage and the family: "People who were originally put off by The Homecoming may now find it too close to home. It's a bit like Picasso's shockingly severe painting of Gertrude Stein from 1906, the one he predicted in time would resemble its subject. We may not have thought we saw ourselves in The Homecoming four decades ago. Now it feels like a mirror", posited critic Ben Brantley. Other critics, like Lahr in Demolition Man, remind their readers of the strong element of comedy in this play, as in many of Pinter's other plays. Composition history Pinter wrote The Homecoming in six weeks in 1964 from his home in the Sussex coastal town of Worthing, where, according to theatre critic John Lahr, "the magnificent barrenness of the play's North London setting was imagined as he sat at his writing desk overlooking gardens, within earshot of the sea." According to Lahr, Pinter remarked that "it kind of wrote itself." Pinter's close friend and former schoolteacher, Joseph Brearley, was visiting Pinter after he had written the play. "I gave him the play to read," Pinter recalled. "I waited in another room. About two hours later, I heard the front door slam. I thought, Well, here we are. He doesn't like it. About an hour later, the doorbell rang. I answered it. He said, 'I had to get some air.' He said, 'It is your best.' " Production history Productions of the play have won major theatre awards. The 1967 New York production received four Tony Awards: the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play (Paul Rogers), the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play (Ian Holm), the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play (Peter Hall), and the Tony Award for Best Play (Alexander H. Cohen, prod.). A film of the play, based on Pinter's own screenplay and also entitled The Homecoming and directed by Sir Peter Hall, was released in 1973. It features