Harold Pinter is best known as a dramatist and screenwriter, but thanks to Julian Sands and John Malkovich, we must now recognize him as a poet as well, one of the finest of the 20th century.
In 2005, the Nobel Laureate Pinter was invited to read his poetry at a benefit for a woman's shelter in London. Too ill at the time to speak in public, he asked his colleague, the actor Julian Sands, to fill in for him, something that Sands did with remarkable skill. Last summer, Sands reprised his Pinter reading at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with the help of director John Malkovich. Now the same team has brought A Celebration of Harold Pinter to Los Angeles as a fund-raiser for the non-profit Odysssey Theater Ensemble.
Sands is the ideal person to stand in for Pinter (who died of cancer in 2008). He has not only directed many of Pinter's plays but enjoyed a 30-year friendship with him.
In A Celebration, Sands recites his favorite poems of Pinter's, some of which date back to the 1950s, when Pinter was a struggling and unknown actor. Even then, as the poems show, he had a dazzling command of language and a terse, unique style that he soon employed as a playwright in works like The Caretaker and The Homecoming.
Sands delivers two hours' worth of Pinter's poetry and prose, interspersed with personal reminiscences of the man (many on the irreverent and bawdy side). He works with a minimum of movement or gesture, commanding the stage with his actorly presence and diction, his warmth and dignity as a human being. It's easy to see why Pinter picked him as his stand-in: his performance is spellbinding.
Pinter's range as a poet was wide: his main concerns were art, truth and politics, but he also wrote movingly about love, death...and cricket.
