It began as a quixotic project three years ago in local theatre. Now the story of the man who was born on a slave ship and became the first black Briton to vote has taken on new urgency, post the Windrush scandal, as it opens at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall after a run in New York.
Paterson Joseph, a Royal Shakespeare Company actor and a familiar face in the TV series Casualty and Peep Show, wrote Sancho: An Act of Remembrance initially out of frustration, he says, at the lack of roles for black actors in period dramas. It has developed into something with much wider significance. And in the heat of the Windrush scandal, it’s become more poignant than ever before.
The play tells the story of Charles Ignatius Sancho, who was born on a slave ship bound for New Granada (modern-day Colombia). His mother died at his birth and his father killed himself shortly afterwards. For years, the young Sancho battled servitude and the prejudice of 18th-century London. But he emerged to become a prominent actor and musician, befriending along the way the artist Thomas Gainsborough, who painted his portrait.
It was seeing a grainy image of that painting in a book that began Joseph’s quest to find out who Sancho was. More than a decade on, he says that researching Sancho’s life has re-defined how he feels to be black and British today.
Growing up in London in the 1970s, Joseph was “always defensive” about the colour of his skin. People would ask him where he was from and then chuckle when he replied “Willesden Green”, saying, “Yes – but where are you really from?”
It dawned on him from an early age that people were not seeing him as a boy from the borough of Brent. “They were seeing a blackness.”
That childhood memory has become a prologue to his play, much of which is now told through improvisation. “Sancho’s not a role I have to get into,” he says. “The character is already in me.”
The historical facts of Sancho’s life are scant, and much of the story has had to be reimagined.
“If you look at a man 250 years ago who looks like you, whose brothers and sisters were enslaved, beaten, crushed, killed – and yet he voted when most of the white population couldn’t vote, you think, wow, if he can do it, what the hell am I doing being apathetic?”
Performing the play at the National Black Theatre in Harlem this month confirmed for Joseph what he had started to feel more and more: that the story has a powerful resonance today. At the end of the first night, in this famously intimate theatre in New York, an elderly African-American woman stood up in the audience and shouted, “Sonny, that ain’t no old story – that’s happening to us today!”
“After that I was holding court every night like a sort of British Martin Luther King,” Joseph says. “I suddenly realised, this play is about America, it’s about Britain, it’s about the ‘now’.”
It ran for two weeks in Harlem and after each performance the theatre organised a voter registration drive, giving people forms to take away and fill out. “We got a lot of takers,” Joseph says. It was so successful, in fact, that he has been asked to bring the play back to New York in 2020 in the hope of encouraging a stronger black vote in the run-up to the next presidential election.
Despite the seriousness of its subject matter, Joseph insists the play – a one-man show, in essence – is at times “very funny”. “I can’t believe people could have survived hundreds of years of near-genocide and back-breaking work, and rape and all the awful things of slavery without having a sense of humour,” he says.
Sancho was a forerunner, Joseph believes, of the struggle for freedom and the right to vote.
“I now walk the streets of London knowing that probably 30,000 black people were walking these same streets 250 years ago,” he says. “Knowing that makes me feel solid.”
