Actor Julian Sands (pictured right) answers questions from the audience after performing selections from writer Harold Pinter’s poetry. / Photo by Hagar Elsayed, Photography Editor
British actor Julian Sands delivered a performance showcasing the life and poetry of Nobel Prize-winning writer Harold Pinter last night at the Emerson Concert Hall in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in an event titled “A Celebration of Harold Pinter.”
Directed by famous actor and director John Malkovich, the one-man show’s focus on Pinter’s poetry showed the audience a different side of the writer, who is better known for his plays such as “The Birthday Party” and “The Homecoming,” which won a Tony Award. Pinter’s works are particularly known for using understatement to convey characters’ emotions.
Sands has appeared in films such as A Room With a View and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and is famous for his roles in movies such as Oceans 13 and Arachnophobia. He has been performing A Celebration of Harold Pinter since 2011, when it debuted at the Edinburgh Festival.
Sands stood in the center of Emerson stage for an audience of about 300 people. Sands opened the performance with one of Pinter’s more complex poems.
“I know the place / It is true / Everything we do / Corrects the space / Between death and me and you,” read Sands from Pinter’s collection Various Voices.
Sands went on to read this poem a total of four times throughout the night, praising its “beauty and metaphysical complexity.” He then told the audience about how he once questioned Pinter’s use of the word “corrects.” Pinter, Sands said, then scoffed and replied, “Maybe someday you’ll understand.”
This poem-anecdote sequence occurred numerous times throughout the performance, with Sands transitioning between readings of Pinter’s poems and narratives about Pinter’s personality. Sands’ performance demonstrated the “master-apprentice” relationship between him and Pinter, which began when Pinter approached Sands to deliver a selection of his poems in 2005.
College senior Jacob Zack said that while he was familiar with Pinter’s plays, Sands’ performance gave him more insight into Pinter as an artist.
“I really enjoyed the way [Sands] mixed in narrative elements and anecdotal stories in with the poetry,” Zack said. “The way he was weaving in stories about Pinter’s life while having his work in it too made me understand [Pinter] as a man more.”
Sands performed poems that highlighted various events in Pinter’s life: his relationship with British author Antonia Fraser, his battle with cancer and his thoughts on Irish writer Samuel Beckett, among other things.
College freshman Mario Perez said this balance between poetry and narrative was unique to any other theater performance he had ever seen.
“It was a very different experience of theater,” Perez said. “It felt like a play, but it wasn’t a play. It was a biography.”
The program was funded by the Donna and Marvin Schwartz Artists in Residence Program, a program established this year to bring artists to Emory to engage with the community. The performance is also the third event of “Pinter Fest,” a series of events celebrating Pinter from September to November.
Ruiqi Yin, a College freshman, said she came to the event to learn more about Pinter, after becoming involved with “Pinter Fest.”
“It was pretty awesome,” Yin said. “I’m actually getting to know Pinter a bit more, which is helpful. I like it.”
–By Harmeet Kaur, Digital Editor
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