your mother died" (pp 57–58). A major irony is that Max's apparently-mistaken first assumption becomes more accurate as the family (and the audience) get to "know" Ruth better (pp. 65–76). The play makes clear to Teddy's family, even if Teddy refuses to acknowledge it, that Ruth has been, to say the least, increasingly unhappy in married life and in the United States. When her husband insists she is "not well" (p. 85) and simply needs to "rest" (p. 71), Teddy is clearly both downplaying and ignoring the cause and extent of her discontent, even depression, draping his words in almost Victorian modesty. However, he ultimately elects to leave without her rather than fight for her. It has not been Teddy's "homecoming" but that of Ruth. Critical response Often considered to be a highly ambiguous, an enigmatic, and for some even a cryptic play, The Homecoming has been the subject of extensive critical debate since it premiered. According to many critics, it exposes issues of sex and power in a realistic yet aesthetically stylised manner. Surveying Pinter's career on the occasion of the 40-anniversary Broadway production of the play at the Cort Theatre in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr describes the impact of experiencing it: The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realised, could convey volumes." Like other contemporary critics familiar with The Homecoming, Ben Brantley praises the play's two-act plot structure, referring to its "nigh-perfect form." In the 1960s, when first encountering the play, its earliest critics complained that, like Pinter's other plays as perceived then, The Homecoming seemed, in their words, "plotless," "meaningless," and "emotionless" (lacking character motivation), and they found the play "puzzling" (their word); later critics argue that the play evokes a multiplicity of potential meanings, leading to multiple interpretations. In "Demolition Man", Lahr considers The Homecoming to be The Homecoming directly challenges the place of morals in family life and puts their social value "under erasure" (in Derridean terminology). Teddy's profession as an academic philosopher, which, he claims, enables him to "maintain ... intellectual equilibrium" — ironically raises basic philosophical questions about the nature