From slave ship to man of letters - an extraordinary black tale in Chichester

Paterson Joseph tells his story – and his own – in Sancho & Me: For One Night Only in Chichester’s Minerva Theatre on Thursday, January 9 and Friday, January 10. It’s on for two nights – despite the subtitle, a subtitle intended to convey the fact that each night is different depending on the questions the audience ask. In the second half Paterson takes the stage as Sancho, invites questions from the audience and answers them in character.

“It really started back in 1999 when I was looking for a character that I could get a writer to write for me. I wanted a pre-20th century black figure and I wanted a real one. I discovered a book called Black England and I discovered black Britain started way back in the Roman period. I was shocked by the stories that I knew nothing about at all. There was a trumpeter in the time of Henry VIII and he was famous in his time but he was not the only black trumpeter or even the only black man in the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII. These stories were all hidden to me.

“And then I came across the story of Sancho. It was the image really that started me. If you see the painting of him by Gainsborough, it's a really striking image and yet we're talking of someone who was born on a slave ship.

“I wrote a one-person show. The trouble with having an idea is that you know how you want to deliver it and it's hard for someone else to deliver it. I couldn't get anyone else to figure out what I wanted so I started writing it myself. I had been writing myself quite shyly for a while and it took me nearly six years before I put pen to paper. I wanted to do all the research and I wanted the story to be really clear. I wrote a play that was effectively an audience with Sancho. And then lockdown happened but somehow this curious character kept on bothering me and I wanted to go deeper into the story and so I wrote the novel.”

Part-biography and part-dramatised readings from the novel The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the current show is the next step, an evening of storytelling using Sancho's compositions and original music by co-creator, composer and musician Ben Park.

“I think the story is just so curious. It was impossible to resist. He was born on a slave ship and he was an orphan by the time he was two. Probably his mother died in childbirth and probably his father (took his own life). He was brought to England and he ran away and he was found by a Duke and it's just the most extraordinary Dickensian story. He ended up being a painter and an actor and a composer and having a grocery store and because he owned property he could vote. It was one of the most spectacular rises but he also wrote this great, great music. He was a composer but he wrote dance music, jigs and reels, music really to get you up, music which is very lively and I just love it.

“The show is Sancho & Me, and it is my story intertwined with his, black British stories from 250 years apart.”

As for the questions which he takes in character from the audience: “I answer the questions as him. It's all too painfully easy to become him. Some people say that I am possessed! He's a very different person to me but he’s got such a style of talking that I just let him run. I get that style from the letters and I read a lot around him just to get the atmosphere but he's got a way of talking that was so particular and peculiar. What it is is this voice that is the voice of somebody that uses English as a sword and a shield. He is an orator. He uses wonderful words and sometimes he makes them up. He is thinking how can I persuade people. He is a communicator and he wants conversation.”