THEATER REVIEW: A CELEBRATION OF HAROLD PINTER

Julian Sands and John Malkovich in A Celebration of Harold Pinter.

San(d)s the playwright

By Ed Rampell

At the March opening of this one man show director John Malkovich introduced the piece by calling it “a result of my 30-year-friendship with Julian and a fascination with Harold Pinter.” Although Malkovich is best known for acting, he noted, “I’ve directed [dozens] of his plays and acted in 10 of them… It’s delightful to hear Harold’s words again and to see Julian onstage” in this fundraiser to benefit L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre.

That Julian is Julian Sands, whose name may not be on the tips of the tongues of U.S. ticket buyers, but whose face and voice are instantaneously recognizable. Like Pinter, the Yorkshire-born Sands is a fellow Brit, who has appeared in countless plays and movies, including 2011’s American version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 2007’s Ocean’s Thirteen and the TV series 24. Sands is no stranger to playing great writers, having previously portrayed British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the 1986 film, Gothic. He and Malkovich originally presented the reading at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.

In A Celebration of Harold Pinter Sands occasionally gives raspy voice to that quick witted, temperamental English playwright, poet and actor, but does not depict him per se. Rather, this two-act production consists mostly of Sands appearing as himself while paying tribute to Pinter, with anecdotes of and about him (some drawn from the memoir of Pinter's widow, Antonia Fraser), Pinter’s comments about contemporaries such as playwright Samuel Beckett and on cricket (!), readings from some of the bard’s plays, which dominate the first act, and his poems, which form the bulk of act two.

According to press notes, what is now a homage to Pinter grew out of an invitation to Pinter to read his poems at a benefit for a women’s shelter at a London church. As the author was too ill to do so, he asked Sands to read on his behalf “on the condition of spending time together, rehearsing the works,” which was music to Sands’ ears. Pinter died of cancer in 2008 at the age of 78.

The result is a rare treat for theater and poetry aficionados. Sands has one of those mellifluous voices that, as the old cliché goes, could reduce listeners to tears with his recitation of the names on a phonebook’s pages. The handsome, blonde thespian brings Pinter’s prose, poems and drama alive and is a delight to hear and watch onstage, a rare in person treat. Sands alternates between reading aloud from a few dog-eared, bookmarked volumes (he’s been anointed to sign them on behalf of the Pinteresque powers that be, with proceeds benefiting the Odyssey) and spinning yarns.

Pinter did not suffer fools gladly (or quietly). He brandished his quill like a rapier, lashing out at privilege and the powerful with a literary savagery. Sands notes this was shaped, early on, by a “contentious anti-Semitism in the East End,” where Pinter grew up a Jew of humble, working class origins. In terms of cinema, Pinter is largely known for his collaborations with director Joseph Losey, such as 1963’s class conscious, The Servant and 1967’s Accident. Pinter’s collaboration with Losey speaks volumes about his own political sentiments, which were always stolidly in solidarity with the common folk he sprang from.

Sands does not dwell on Pinter’s progressive politics, nor does he shy away from them. He reads with relish from Pinter’s searing poems Democracy and The Special Relationship and a passage from Harold’s courageously biting 2005 Nobel Lecture, Art, Truth and Politics, wherein, among other things, he ferociously snapped at those hellish hounds of war, Mssrs. Bush, Blair and company, for invading an Iraq that had not attacked either America or the U.K., and which, as it turned out, failed to produce those confabulated WMDs which provided the pretense for a mass murder rather theatrically dubbed “shock and awe.” One would have thought that this laureate was winning the Nobel Prize for Peace, instead of for Literature.

Sands informs us that winning the Nobel Prize “was a great joy” to the dying writer, who was too sick to travel in person to Sweden, but managed to deliver his acceptance speech rejecting war and injustice via video. The actor also informs us during the second act that after World War II Pinter sought conscientious objector status when he was drafted by Britain’s imperial military.

After the play, as Sands signed Pinter books, I asked him what happened with Pinter's bold effort to avoid conscription. The thespian replied, “the judge saw that Harold was sincere in his beliefs, and could have sentenced him to a prison term.” I quipped, “Instead he received a life sentence in the theater,” and Sands, who has trod many a board himself, smiled.

This one-man show is tautly, adroitly directed by Malkovich, who is primarily known to auds as an actor in indies ranging from 1999’s Being John Malkovich to big budge blockbusters such as 1997’s Con Air, wherein he often ignites the screen as an incendiary loon. But Malkovich rose through the ranks as a stage actor, starting out with Chicago’s hallowed Steppenwolf Company, winning a 1983 Obie for Sam Shepard’s True West and co-starring with Dustin Hoffman in the 1984 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; he’s also been an outstanding theatre director. As I took my seat in the Odyssey, I passed Malkovich and told him how, many moons ago, I’d enjoyed Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead, which Malkovich had helmed and starred my boyhood best friend, Danton Stone. When I mentioned Stone's name Malkovich’s face lit up, perhaps with memories of the pure artistry that preceded the often commercial stardom that followed (although this is not to imply that Malkovich isn’t also a great screen actor, as he is, and his Lenny in the 1992 film version Of Mice and Men still makes me weepy). In any case, Malkovich, who was glammed down at this benefit for one of L.A.’s best theatres, with its trinity of stages, was very gracious.

I went to this Pinter tribute mainly to learn more about a seminal playwright who, I discovered, was also a poet capable of making the heavens rage. I also had a highly enjoyable evening at the theatre, but had one regret: Sands did not read from any of Pinter’s 25 screenplays. But this is a mere quibble. If poetry and/or theatre and/or great acting are your thing(s), I highly recommend this well-deserved and wonderfully presented celebration, which is being brought back for a second weekend by, as they say, popular demand.


A Celebration of Harold Pinter returns Friday, April 6 and Saturday, April 7 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, April 8 at 5 p.m. at the Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. For more info: 310/477-2055; www.odysseytheatre.com.