A Celebration of Harold Pinter
written by Harold Pinter
starring Julian Sands
directed by John Malkovich
The Irish Repertory Theatre
March 19, 2016
Production website
💉💉 out of 5

I really need to schedule that first show back in New York more carefully. After having been away from grown-up theatre for a few weeks/months my ear gets a little lazy. Way too many episodes of COPS and Jail (two of my decidedly guilty pleasures) have dumbed down my ear to mere shouting a few curse words. I have the attention span of a sparrow and an almost barbiturate response to a story asking more than 5 minutes of my time. I am WAY out of shape and here I am scheduling my very first show back as a one man show exploring the rather dense poetry of the famous playwright Harold Pinter. A beautiful, literate, rather static rendering of poetry with a simple table as the only set piece. God, I am out of shape!

The play was actually quite fascinating. Pinter has always been one of my laborite playwrights He embraces and embodies the STAGE PAUSE like very few playwrights. He is the high priest of “subtext” and purposely embeds the pause to hold the actor accountable to populate this pause. College in the 1970’s demanded that you read and appreciate his works of The Caretaker, The Birthday Party, Betrayal, and Old Times among others.

This “Celebration”  however, did not focus on his stage literature or his admittedly fascinating body of work of the film. It focused on his life and his very personal poetry. The performer, Mr. Sands, said that all of Pinter’s plays took you to “another world.” It was only his poetry that took us to him. Mr. Julian Sands, the performer, was a close friend of Harold Pinter and was the actual voice that Pinter used to have his work read out loud in that esophageal cancer had robbed him of his actual voice. Julian Sands KNEW this poetry. He embodied this poetry. He inherited this poetry.

OF all the wonderful things that his poetry explored I was most struck by the poetry that he wrote after his cancer diagnosis. From diagnosis to death he had a few brief years to really capture the experience in words. In those years he worked to say goodbye to Antonia Fraser, his beloved wife:

I know the place.
It is true.
Everything we do
Corrects the space
Between death and me
And you.”

I was struck how he personified and “named” his cancer experience:

“Cancer
cells are those which have forgotten how
to die” –
nurse, Royal Marsden hospital
They have
forgotten how to die
And so extend
their killing life.
I and my tumour
dearly fight.
Let’s hope a
double death is out.

 

And most moving of all was the final collection of poetry we wrote:

“What sound was
that?/I turn away, into the shaking room./What was that sound that came in on
the dark?/What is this maze of life it leaves us in?/What is this stance we
take,/to turn away and then turn back?/What did we hear?/It was the breath we
took when we first met./Listen. It is here.”

This play made me fall in love with Pinter again. In fact, I am on my way to Drama Book Shop to get a play or two of his. I want to see how the man at the end of his life could be found in the work of his youth. This is my scavenger hunt of the day. Who knows what I will find!

One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.