SOURCE: Hornby, Richard. “Free Association.” Hudson Review 55, no. 2 (summer 2002): 286-92.

In the following review, Hornby asserts that, while Homebody/Kabul is written in a formless style, it is a major play by an important playwright.

George Bernard Shaw once said that when he wrote his plays, he never thought about plot. Instead, he just created some characters and “let 'em rip.” This reaction against the well-made plays that dominated the late nineteenth-century stage continues in our own day, with playwrights spewing out dialog at random. Some, like Samuel Beckett, have consciously applied the free association technique of psychoanalysis, letting the talk go where it will, ad-lib, never censoring or revising. This risky method can of course result in pompous drivel when the writer lacks Beckett's discipline, intelligence, vast reading, and strong sense of characterization, but it can also yield a strange poetic intensity. Plot is all but dead...