This "one night only" experience is hard to categorise. Blending biography, fiction, autobiography, music, anecdote and book tour, the show shares snippets of the remarkable story of Charles Ignatius Sancho. This is channelled through the charismatic presence of Paterson Joseph, who for years has steeped himself in the history of this forgotten man.
Born to enslaved African parents aboard a ship en route to America, Ignatius Sancho was taken back to Britain at an early age, where he managed to earn himself an education and escape his bondage. This remarkable journey led him to a prominent position in London society, as he became a composer, a diarist and the first black person to vote in Britain.
Joseph drew on his passion for and detailed research into this man as a starting point for a novel, which he wrote during lockdown, but the story seemingly will not release him. Hence this touring performance.
As a performer, he is charming and has great stage presence, speaking directly to his audience with a great sense of intimacy as he introduces the idea that stories are our most powerful means for conveying such otherwise forgotten facts: "the shortest distance between two people is a story", as he opines at one point.
The evening is sprinkled with such aphorisms and exhortations: "Honour thy father. And forgive him," he intones. One of the pleasures here is the play between character and self—fact, autobiography and fiction—as Joseph weaves the narration of historical record together with imagined episodes to "fill the gaps" and tales of his own youth growing up as a child of black immigrants in London. At times, he links moments in his own story with those in Ignatius Sancho’s, a simple gesture often sufficing to signal the parallel.
There is a soundtrack of semi-improvised music, some played live and some prerecorded but remixed live by collaborator Ben Park. While this is more fully realised at some times than others, it adds a texture to the performance, sampling Ignatius Sancho’s own music (and others) to provide the backing to scenes of formal balls or more contemporary London dancehalls.
The first half proceeds in this way, with a tapestry of stories drawn together by Joseph’s compelling storytelling style. He is a loquacious, convincing speaker, with the facility of moving between off-the-cuff discussion and more scripted moments without missing a beat. Often, I was hard-pressed to tell which might be which.
After the interval, Joseph returns costumed up to mirror the portrait of Ignatius Sancho that has been present throughout and invites questions from the audience. Here his mastery of his subject is on full display, as he rustles up facts, quotations, characters and snippets of performance on spec. This adds another strand to the unusual mix: that of a Stanislavski-derived "hotseating" exercise. Joseph punctures the pomposity this might suggest, with wry irony reassuring us that he does know he ends and the character begins.
The evening runs a little over two hours, due to Joseph’s (self-confessed) tendency to get carried away. Along the way, we’re treated to fascinating glimpses into this (to me) hitherto entirely unknown historical figure, moments of Joseph’s own life story, poignancy as well as warm comedy—and reminders of the brutality of racism and the importance of noting whose stories get told.
If this serves to sell some books, so much the better: it’s certainly a more fascinating combination than the usual ‘evening with’ or book reading, and so much more than either.