“Working with Harold is a formidable task, and it had its own limitations. I worked with him for this one-off gig. He was very precise. And that tutelage was a unique thing.”
Sands does not play the character of Pinter. “It’s not me dramatizing Harold, no, that would be too formidable a task. This is me as me, presenting my celebration of Harold Pinter. What I do is, I tell the story of the life and work of Harold Pinter. Mostly through his own words, but also through the words of others. It’s his poetry, diaries, letters, interviews, quotations — and very deliberately, none of his drama. But it hangs together as what I would call a literary portrait. Because the author of the plays is an oblique figure, it would be very hard to create a portrait of the playwright from reading his plays. But in his direct speech writings, he reveals a portrait of extraordinary humanity, and power. And humor. And that’s what I present.”
The actor does, however, find himself slipping into the Pinter persona from time to time as he reads the great man’s words. “He does have a habit of showing up, of hovering around. I’ve never done a show when I haven’t felt his presence, in a very tangible way. In some places he has a habit of compelling me to channel him. It’s quite clear when I’m inhabiting Harold — or when Harold is inhabiting me — and when it’s me as me. It makes for an interesting two-hander!”
The man who Julian Sands got to know so well over those last few years of Pinter’s life was a larger-than-life character, someone who “had a real aura of authority and intelligence about him. If Harold came into a room, everyone was conscious that he was there. He was like a great bird of prey, circling on the picture frame and gazing at the room. He had a remarkable presence, which he used as an actor himself — he trained as an actor and worked as an actor throughout his life, sometimes in his own material but often in other people’s. What I wasn’t aware of, though, before reading the material, particularly the poetry, is an incredible tenderness, a sort of romantic side, a side of tremendously touching and loving feeling. And that’s undeniably apparent if you read, or if you hear me recite, his material. He’s on a level of poetry with Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats — he achieves his intentions with the same level of prowess as those fellows. He wasn’t just writing poetry as a hobby, he was a poet before he was a playwright.”
That long-ago luncheon where Sands and Pinter connected still reverberates through Sands’ life, and on the stage where he presents this portrait. “I’d been aware of him all my professional life. I’d studied his plays in high school, when he was a sort of über-figure for me. So it was extraordinarily providential, that lunch. But looking back, having been performing this piece, on and off, since we first met, there was a kind of inevitability about it.”