SOURCE: Morley, Sheridan. “Territorial Imperative.” Spectator 278, no. 8792 (1 February 1997): 42-3.

In the following review, Morley praises Pinter's The Homecoming as a magnificently plotted drama that is both comic and sinister.

Why were we always so afraid to laugh at, or at any rate with, Harold Pinter? When The Homecoming first opened in 1965 at the Aldwych, I seem to remember reverent silences both on stage and in the auditorium, and a willing suspension of disbelief that this was the same dramatist who, only a few years earlier, had been writing hilariously sinister revue sketches for comics like Kenneth Williams and Peter Cook, not that there were ever many like them.

Thirty years on, an admirable new revival at the National Theatre by Roger Michell makes it clear that this is indeed the Pinter of the revue sketches, and much of at least the first half of the Lyttelton production is...