The least of The Homecoming's troubles is that it does not make sense. This only stirs the interpreters, professional and amateur, to greater heights of interpretative madness. Ambiguity and implication are, of course, valid and potent artistic devices, but if the whole scenario, on almost all levels, has to be supplied by the critic or spectator, who then is the playwright? Pinter's play, like all his others, depends on tricks of diametrical reversal, going from one extreme to the other and saying vague, hostile nothings that can be made menacing, portentous or deep.

The basic flaw of The Homecoming is that it is totally formulaic and predictable: every character, sooner or later, becomes the opposite of himself. (p. 345)

These instant contradictions extend to the whole play…. Now, people are often inconsistent, but they are not schematically self-contradictory. Nor are they, and this is the second big flaw here, all profoundly repulsive or utter nullities. But those are the only kinds of characters you tend to find peopling (or, rather, insecting) a Pinter play. Pitiful worms or poisonous adders: nobody you can care about in the least; not even when, as invariably happens, the worms lengthen into adders, and the adders shrivel into worms.

This leaves the language. But there hardly is any in Pinter: only commonplaces, repetitions, insults, non sequiturs and pauses. This too is a language, I grant you, but is it a language for human beings?… [But] the pauses, ah, those famous Pinter pauses! How minimal can minimal art get? That is where you, dear spectator, fill in the play. And if others can have their interpretations, you won't be caught with your mystagogic pants down either, by gum…. As for all those gratuitous pauses, if they serve any purpose, it is to stretch Pinter's meager, stunted inventions into full-length plays. (pp. 346-47)

Most noteworthy is the play's intense though latent homosexuality. Once again the motif of the same woman (and what a beastly woman!) shared by two or more men somehow involved with one another—in rivalry, kinship or love-hate—appears; just as it did in The Servant, Accident, and The Basement, among others. And as so often is the case with homosexual sensibility, the action oscillates between affectlessness and sadomasochism. Instead of a casebook on The Homecoming, I'd like a case history on its author. (p. 347)