Paterson Joseph tells Giles Woodforde about his impressive one-man show Sancho: An Act of Remembrance

Born on a slave ship, and forced to work as a slave in 18th-century Greenwich, Ignatius Sancho was the first black African known to have voted in a British election.

He went on to become butler to the prestigious Montagu family, then owned a grocery shop in Westminster. Alongside this, he blossomed into a prolific correspondent, composed music, and acted on the stage. All of which has provided a great deal of material for actor/writer Paterson Joseph’s one-man show Sancho: An Act of Remembrance.

The show was first staged at Oxford’s Burton Taylor Studio four years ago, but has now been extensively rewritten. The new version had its world premiere on the main Oxford Playhouse stage before touring the United States.

Sitting surrounded by pages of the new script in a rehearsal studio in London, I ask Paterson how he first discovered Sancho.

“I was desperate to do a costume drama,” he reveals.

“As a black actor, it’s difficult to get costume drama work. So I thought: ‘I’ll write, or find, a character, then they’ll have to put me in it because I’m starring as the person concerned, and I wrote the show as well’. That’s the very shallow truth.

“So I started researching, and discovered a great book by Gretchen Gerzina called Black England.

“The book was a mine of knowledge, and it had a strange picture in it: a line drawing of a very dignified-looking black man, taken from a 1768 painting by Thomas Gainsborough. And that’s how I found Sancho.”

In the play, Sancho frequently displays a very self-deprecating sense of humour, and I quickly sense it’s a characteristic shared by Paterson Joseph himself.

Besides roles in TV shows such as Casualty, Safe House, and the overpowering Alan Johnson in cult comedy Peep Show in Britain, Paterson has worked extensively in the US: “American theatre audiences and TV viewers just love British actors,” he says.

“As a result,” he continues, “you have to be careful not to believe too much of the gushing hype that comes your way. For instance, I was in Thailand for four months, doing a film called The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I played cards with Tilda Swinton in the filming breaks, it was altogether a very glamorous life. Then I came back to do a student film, and ended up dressed only in a loincloth on top of a roof in Croydon. It poured with rain, and the lights kept spluttering. I thought: ‘This is the real world, welcome back!’”

And here speaks an actor who also thought he had a nice role in the Paddington film.

“I went to the cinema and was really enjoying this great film. Then Jim Broadbent said some of my lines. This is ridiculous, I thought. Later I found a message from the director in my junk mail saying: ‘Before you go and see the film, you should know that you’re not in it any more’”.

But how about Sancho? Does his sense of humour mask a feeling of bitterness about his early life as a black man in Britain?

“Every now and then, out of the blue, in his letters, there’s a line or two about not having any friends,” Paterson replies.

“Or he writes: ‘Trade is duller than I ever knew it, money scarcer’. But I think he has decided to be very positive, because he knew that pessimism would only be debilitating. He uses optimism as a weapon.”

SEE IT
Sancho: An Act of Remembrance is at the Oxford Playhouse from September 17-19.
Tickets from oxfordplayhouse.com