Julian Sands Stars in ‘A Celebration of Harold Pinter’

It’s hard to categorize actor Julian Sands except for one thing: if you see him in anything—movies, television, what all—you can’t quite get his image out of your head.

He’s in Washington this Saturday at the Lansburgh Theatre to do “A Celebration of Harold Pinter,” presented by Washington Performing Arts. It is a one-man performance-production directed by the actor John Malkovitch, a theater piece that concentrates on the late Nobel Prize-winning playwright’s poetry, which is rarely heard, but probably much read, given the giant shadow cast by Pinter and his plays.

This project has become something of a legacy for Sands, who works regularly, on stages, television and in movies, but was approached by Pinter himself as far back as 2005.

Sands called out of the blue, and for some reason, beside the fact that his name popped up on Caller ID, I recognized his voice. I remember him distinctly from one of his best films and roles, the 1991 “Impromptu”, about the lives and loves of great artists, composers, and writers in which he played the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, Bernardette Peters played his wife, Hugh Grant was Chopin, Judy Davis played George Sand and Mandy Patinkin played a French painter whose name escapes.

“That was a wonderful experience,” he said, remembering. “Working with so many terrific actors, and the subject, well, that was a rare thing.”

Pinter, of course was the master of the oblique, the unsaid, discerning and dissecting the lives of contemporary relationships in such plays as “No Man’s Land,” “Old Times,” “The Homecoming” and “Betrayal”.

“This all began in 2005,” he said. “I knew him of course, and he approached me about doing a one man piece focusing on his poetry. He wrote quite a lot of it, even long before he started writing plays. The thing was, he wanted me to do a master class with him, basically with him overseeing every inch of material. It was a very strenuous, even difficult task, to make something of this, me working with him. But it was a tremendously rewarding. We became friends during the course of things. The poetry is very different from his plays. More personal. You get a real sense of the person, the man. He was also a very funny man.”

The finished product premiered at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe Festival to considerable acclaim and he has toured with it ever since, off and on. Sands had worked with Malkovitch on “The Killing Fields.” Malkovitch is an American actor who has had a similar career filled with oddities, highs and lows, independent small films, then villains in big budget Hollywood action movies—memorably “In The Line of Fire”.

“What we’ve ended up with it in not just a poetry reading,” he said. “I’ve added anecdotes from working together with Harold on this, stories about his plays, the poems, certainly, and his life,” he said. “It’s a celebration, but you know, when the lights go up, you feel like a soloist, you’re alone with the audience in a way that most playwright surely ever do.”

“Personally, I think he was the most influential playwright of our times,” he said.

Pinter was famous for the pauses—written into the script—that characterized his characters, often while taking puffs on cigarettes. “There are pauses, yes,” Sands said.

“I think it’s done very well, and so here we are, all roads lead to Washington, right”. Actually, Pinter’s plays have been performed regularly on Washington stages—at Arena, Studio, and Scena Theatre among others.

“He was all about language,” Sands said. “The utterances, the sentences are precise and revealing.”

Sands, in his 50s now and still retaininh the matinee blonde good looks of his early career, which included quality films like “The Killing Fields,” “Room With a View,” “Impromptu,” as well as distinctly offbeat fare like “Gothic,” a Ken Russell take on the Victorian poets like the Shelley and Byron, not to mention “Boxing Helena,” and “Leaving Las Vegas.” On the BBC he played Laurence Olivier in a film about the enfant terrible of theater, Kenneth Tynan.

He’s always had a penchant for offbeat horror films—the title role in “Warlock” and its sequels, the non-musical film version of “The Phantom of the Opera.” “I’ve just finished a part in ‘Gotham’”, he noted by way of his television career, which included a memorable turn as the terrorist Vladimir Bierko in “24.”

He’s married to his second wife, the writer Evgenia Citkowitz, author of “Ether,” a critically acclaimed book of short fiction. They have two daughters, Natalya and Imogen.

As for Sands, “I am an actor, I go where the work takes me,” he said. He had just completed a film in Turkey, and would be going to Mexico soon after the performance here. “I get on a train, and it takes me to the work. That makes it sometimes difficult for my family, I know,” he remarked.

An actor’s career can seem like a careening kind of thing, from one role to the next. “I’ve had stellar heights, and some projects that were perhaps less so.. But I make it a business to have no regrets. This is what I do.”

About the Pinter celebration, he feels “responsibility to do him justice. But there’s the audience. Myself and Pinter and the audience. I respect that, it’s an intimate kind of thing.”

“A Celebration of Harold Pinter” plays at the Lansburgh Theatre this Saturday at 8 p.m.