Julian Sands brings Harold Pinter’s poetry to life with help from John Malkovich

• Baylin Artists Management
• ONE-MAN SHOW: Julian Sands performs A Celebration of Harold Pinter

British actor Julian Sands tells the story of the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter in his one-man show A Celebration of Harold Pinter. Sands willperform as part of Emory University’s Pinter Fest tonight at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts. “Harold has a habit of showing up,” says Sands of the show, which was directed by actor John Malkovich. “His own words insist on a certain degree of channeling.”

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Sands, who is probably best known to American audiences for his film roles in The Killing Fields, A Room with a View, Warlock, Arachnophobia, and Vatel, says that he first got to know the work of the great playwright when he was in high school in England in the 1970s. “Studying one of his plays, that’s how he came into my consciousness,” Sands recalls. “Much later, when I was at drama school, I always pursued new productions of Harold’s work.” The two began to cross paths, literally, once Sands started to work as an actor on the London stage, and the two became closer when Sands was in the 1987 Robert Altman film of Pinter’s play The Room. In 2005, Sands was asked to present Pinter’s poetry at recital when Pinter himself had to withdraw due to his advancing illness.

“I didn’t know anything of his poetry,” says Sands of the time when he and the author worked closely together to get the reading of the playwright’s lesser-known poetry right. “I was astonished by the revelation of his personal feelings, his absolute openness. Within the plays, the presence of the author is elusive. It would be hard to form a view of who Harold Pinter was from reading the plays. But the poetry is very direct, open, honest ... Working with him on this body of work was an incredibly intimate and revealing experience.”

After Pinter’s death in 2008, Sands repeated the recital as a memorial tribute in Los Angeles, adding some extracts from obituaries and personal remembrances. Actor John Malkovich, friend and colleague to both Sands and Pinter, encouraged Sands to build the memorial into a work of theater. Malkovich became the show’s director, and Sands took the performance to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival followed by a successful run in New York which was extended from 10 performances to 50.

“When you talk about a poetry recital, people have the idea of something very quaint and Victorian,” Sands says. “There’s nothing quaint about Harold Pinter ... I’m the interface between the material and the audience, which is usually hearing and experiencing this material for the first time. What John and I set out to create more than anything else was an entertainment. We want people to enjoy it just as we do, not simply to have an academic experience.”

• Baylin Artists Management
• THE MUSE: “I continue to be fascinated by the depths and scope of the material I present, and that’s why I keep performing it with as much enthusiasm and curiosity as anything I’ve ever done since drama school,” Sands says.

Working with Malkovich, whom Sands first got to know on the set of the 1984 film The Killing Fields, was an experience that helped transform the show. “The director is there to shape the tone, shape the atmosphere, shape the level of projection,” Sands says. “I used to prowl like a panther presenting the material, but John found a stillness in presenting the material. I think it’s much more effective. I think what a director is is a friend to the performer, someone who has a similar sensibility, who can be a first responder and guide how the material can best affect an audience. It’s somebody you need to really trust.”

Sands says that the one-man show is slightly different in each city he’s performed it in: the actor has never performed for an audience in Atlanta, though he did live in the city for six weeks during the filming of the 1993 film Boxing Helena. “It’s very site-specific,” he says. “The show I do in Atlanta may not be exactly the same show I do in another city at another time. I like to shuffle the material around.”

Still, Sands says the most intriguing aspect of the piece for him is the chance to explore the power and complexity of Pinter’s thinking time and again. “I continue to be fascinated by the depths and scope of the material I present, and that’s why I keep performing it with as much enthusiasm and curiosity as anything I’ve ever done since drama school,” he says. “My story is about Harold Pinter. I could not ask for a richer or more fascinating person about whom to tell my story.”

Julian Sands performs A Celebration of Harold Pinter tonight at 7 p.m., at Emory’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. For more information, visit Arts at Emory or call 404-727-5050.