Neil Dickson in "The Standard Bearer"
Fresh from his own one-man show on playwright Harold Pinter, British actor Julian Sands has stepped off the stage to direct another one-man show, Stephen Wyatt’s The Standard Bearer. It was written and set in the early 1980s, Sands says, as a response to the Falklands War.
“Margaret Thatcher sent the flotilla to take on Argentina over the Islands, sort of the last gasp of empire expressing itself,” notes Sands. “But it was too little, too late and too futile.”
While filming in Spain a decade ago, an actor asked Sands — who is known mostly for his film work (Warlock, A Room With a View) – if he could perform The Standard Bearer for him. “It’s about an actor taking Shakespeare to an unnamed former colony and the decline of empire and colonialism and the enduring truth of Shakespeare’s language. There’s tremendous depth and complexity. But the actor who performed it barnstormed it a bit, I thought. It needed a more James Mason-Paul Scofield essence to really find the interior depth of the piece.”
Neil Dickson
He liked it well enough to direct it one day. “I met Neil Dickson who I knew best for his work as Biggles [in the 1986 film Biggles: Adventures in Time]. We read The Standard Bearer a few times and began to shape it and workshop it. I must have seen him do it 70 times and it’s hypnotic every time. It’s 50 minutes long but it’s epic in its breadth and content.” Dickson is also known for the short film Chasing Chekhov and his West End debut in The Gay Lord Quex with Dame Judy Dench.
Standard Bearer playwright Wyatt had been researching British theater companies which, at the beginning of the 20th century, says Sands, “had been going all over the world with tremendously massive sets packed up in chains of barges to carry the accouterments of grand theater. Suddenly, Wyatt describes meeting George, the central character, in his imagination and he came fully formed and talking, dictating. And Stephen describes writing down everything he said and the thing came together in just a few days. Then he shaped the Shakespeare around it. It was almost like a visitation, he told me.”
Think of it as Waiting for Lady Macbeth. “George is about to perform the Scottish play and is motivated to speak to the audience because he must fill time waiting for his wife to turn up. He realizes maybe she’s not coming and he has to do this alone, and maybe he has one drink too many and it all sort of comes out.”
Vagabond
Waiting for the spouse is what Sands and his wife, author Evgenia Citkowitz, regularly do. But they do it willingly. “Being an actor isn’t about success or riches, it’s about a way of life, a philosophy. I think all too often in the modern age, the 21st century age, a lot of the people I meet forget that or don’t understand that. There has to be that nomadic gene, that willingness to go from village to village, to be a troubadour or minstrel, a thing of rags and patches.”
Can a parent successfully spend weeks and months on the road and come home to a happy home? “Well, this parent does,” Sands says with a laugh, “with ballads, songs and snatches.”
He and Citkowitz have two children, 11 and 14, enrolled in the same Los Angeles school where Annette Bening’s kids are schoolmates. Last year, Sands and Bening performed scenes from Hamlet for the students and this month took on Macbeth for them, with scenes that are coincidentally repeated in The Standard Bearer. “Rehearsing for both events,” says Sands, “has been very insightful. I have always felt very comfortable with Annette’s intensity and seriousness and the depth of the work she does. I like my actresses to be real and serious.”
Julian Sands
From a previous marriage Sands has a grown son, 27, married and living in London. “He’s my friend. I stay with him whenever I am there. My wife and I were just talking about Thanksgiving plans and I told her I’m actually going back after this play closes to do a 24-hour play event at the Old Vic, Olivier’s theater. And then I’m staying on to do a film.”
While relaxing on the patio of a café, around the corner from the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre on Melrose where The Standard Bearer goes up, Sands says his schedule is hardly regular. “Every month is different, every year is different, so there’s no pattern to it. Nothing’s ever certain. There’s no complacency.”
Sands remembers a relevant scene from The Loss of Sexual Innocence, which he shot a decade ago with director Mike Figgis. “What it is, really, is memories, dreams and reflections of the filmmaker. I play this character called Nick who just as easily could have been called Mike. There was one amazing image where my character drives away from the home of the family and stops the car and looks back. He sees himself, or a doppelganger, pulling up in the same car and going in to embrace the wife and the children. As he steps in the doppelganger looks back at me, the subject, and closes the door. It’s a wonderful sequence of images and it does express the conflict and the ambiguities of the life of a traveling player who is rooted in a sort of vagabond search, as well as the security and comfort of domestic rootedness. It’s always a search for balance.”
Although Sands usually works on films, “I have gotten in as much theater and radio drama as I can [including last year’s LA Theatre Works production of The School for Scandal with Susan Sullivan. Read here.].”
Sands continues, “I have worked in more than 50 countries, so travel and embracing your realities and relinquishing your realities has always had a Homeric element professionally. The Odyssey thrilled me as a child, the idea of risking everything for one more adventure, hoping to get back to Penelope. I always thought [Wagner’s] Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) was one of my favorite operas, and I think you find that’s the case with a lot of actors and traveling musicians.”
Sands believes it comes down to finding the right partner. He feels fortunate to have met Citkowitz in 1986. “We traveled a lot together before we had children. She’s a writer, too [Ether], and values the undistracted time because I can be a big distraction when I’m around. It’s like having an over-sized dog, she tells me, always wagging his tail, wanting to go for a walk.”
Because the two are in harmony and living vicariously through each other, he maintains, it works. Citkowitz is currently in London for two weeks. “She is working with Richard Eyre because he’s directing an adaptation of one of her mother’s books for the Hampstead Theatre Club.” The play is The Last of the Duchess, based on the book by Lady Caroline Blackwood, who died in 1996.
“So I’m Mr. Mom now. There were no rules about anything to do with anything of being an actor or being in a relationship. You just sort of try to find what works for you and what is true to you and if you’re lucky you make it work.”
Harold Pinter and John Malkovich
Julian Sands directs Neil Dickson in "The Standard Bearer"
Sands recently performed in a solo show, directed by John Malkovich. He and Malkovich go back many years, professionally, and as friends. Also, both knew playwright Harold Pinter [2005 Nobel Prize for Literature] who, toward the end of his life, asked Sands to perform his poetry in his stead at a fundraising event. “Harold had esophageal cancer and was not vocally able to do it, so he asked me to, providing I spent time with him.”
That time was rich and fascinating, Sands remembers. He describes the performance differently. “Harold ended up in the front row mouthing the stuff along. It was intended to be encouraging but it was the most intimidating thing I have ever had to contend with!”
After Pinter died in 2008, Sands repeated the tribute in Los Angeles and peppered it with “one or two extracts from obituaries and one or two of my own reflections. The response was incredible.”
Malkovich wasn’t present for the tribute but Sands recorded it. “John was so taken with it and said that if I ever chose to do this as a more legitimate theatrical experience, he would love to shape it with me. He was talking about the interior meaning and richness of the piece and getting the shuffle right, the framing and structuring and getting the confidence to do a larger piece.”
Sands then heard from a producer who wanted him to take it to this year’s Edinburgh Festival and then on tour throughout England. “John was the ideal choice to direct it because he had the enthusiasm for it. He also has a great ear for Pinter’s language. We have such a friendship that we have a shorthand that allows us to achieve in a weekend what it might take others weeks or months to accomplish. But because of our different schedules, we rehearsed this thing in London, Vienna, Los Angeles and finally in Edinburgh where it all came together.”
A tour throughout England followed. Sands returned home to direct The Standard Bearer.
“Work trumps everything,” Sands believes. “Everything. Unless there are absolutely extenuating circumstances. I think work is the greatest love. And I think human relationships…” His voices trails away. “Harold Pinter spoke about it. The only loves that mattered to him were, first, his work, then his family, then cricket. I wouldn’t include cricket.”
In The Standard Bearer Sands has kept the work simple. “I would far rather see deep work than smoke and mirrors and pyrotechnics and flamboyant work. For example I think so much of Shakespeare is often done, for my taste, in too florid a way, too over-choreographed in the language and production.”
Original Shakespeare "treen"
Speaking of Shakespeare, Sands pulls a box from his pants pocket. It’s maroon, about four inches square and less than an inch deep. “In the last two years of Shakespeare’s life he moved back to Stratford and built a home. The New Place, it was called. He planted a mulberry tree. His children and grandchildren continued to live in the house and the tree flourished. People would come and see the tree and embrace it. The family sold the house in the mid 18th century to the new vicar who didn’t want all these ‘pagan pilgrims’ so he had the tree chopped down. The local craftsman, Mr. Sharp, bought all the wood from the tree. He carved all number of ‘treen’.”
With that, Sands opens the box and produces a handcrafted object with a metal cap at one end and an image of Shakespeare’s head at the other. “It’s a pipe tamp, to tamp down tobacco. It’s pretty fragile, this stuff, and most of it just hasn’t survived. This is one of the enduring original Shakespeare tree items and it belonged to Richard Brinsley Sheridan, my wife’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. And it came down to us.”
The couple also has Sheridan’s snuff box, which Sands kept in his waistcoat pocket when he performed School for Scandal last year. “What’s written on the side of the tamp is ‘SHAKESPEARE’S WOOD. MR. SHARP.’ People have asked how can we be sure it’s real? Well, the provenance is contemporary because of Sheridan and everything about it feels right. I told my wife we should give it to the Huntington Library at some point.”
When they’re both in town, of course.
The Standard Bearer; directed by Julian Sands and produced by Jill Schoelen. With Neil Dickson. Opens Oct. 19. Plays Wed., Fri., and Sat at 8 pm. Through November 12. Tickets: $20. Stephanie Feury Studio (SFS) Theatre, 5636 Melrose Ave., LA. 818-424-0282 or 323-960-7770. www.plays411.com/standardbearer
***All The Standard Bearer production photos by Judy Geeson
