A review by Lee Levitt in the Jewish Chronicle, 17 Aug 2011.
"...At its heart are Pinter's poems. Covering love, cancer, death, politics and war, these are deeply personal, sometimes wistful, at others angry and passionate, scowling and howling in a peculiarly Pinteresque way. Sands peppers them with bits of prose and (sometimes amusing) anecdotes of the often irascible, intimidating literary behemoth to try to create a fuller understanding of the man.
...Sands has worked on the piece for a year, in several European locations, with its director...John Malkovich... who was a friend of Pinter's since the 1980s. Sands got to know the poems six years ago when, with Pinter suffering from the cancer of the oesophagus with which he had been diagnosed in 2002, the writer asked the Yorkshire-born actor to stand in for him at a poetry recital in London for a homeless women's charity.
...Intimate and well sourced as it is, it is unabashedly a paeon to Pinter from someone who is in awe of his "intellectual vigour and moral potency", his commitment to "the oppressed and downtrodden". There is nothing about his affair in the 1960s with the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, or of his acrimonious divorce from his first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, in 1980, or of the fact that he was estranged from his son, Daniel. Not is there any indication of the vilification reserved for him in some sections of the Jewish community by his outspoken backing for the Palestinian cause... His moral outrage, many felt, was overwhelmingly one-sided.
But for all that, the piece does not purport to be anything other than a warm and fond tribute from a lifelong fan, which had his audience rapt.
The full article is here
www.thejc.com/arts/theatre/53302/julian-sands-a-celebration-harold-pinter