Writer/Director: Patterson Joseph
Composer: Ben Park
Sancho & Me offers a very curious evening in the theatre: shapeless, but fascinating, moving from well-reasoned attacks on the slave trade and, incidentally, racism in Britain to jolly, off the cuff exchanges with audience members, saving its most blistering attacks for responses to audience questions.
Patterson Joseph first encountered Charles Ignatius Sancho in 1999 and since then this is the third piece he has devoted to him. After a play in 2011, his debut novel, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, published in 2022, was nominated for six literary awards, winning two. This one-man show teams readings from this book with historical fact and entertaining horseplay.
Sancho was born on a slave ship on the way to the American colonies in 1729. The death of both parents resulted in his removal to the household of three unmarried ladies in Greenwich – the inter-continental connections this implies are astonishing! He was kept illiterate, but by a fortunate chance the Duke and Duchess of Montagu took an interest in him, encouraged him in the ways of scholarship and employed him in such household jobs as butler. In the last decade of his life (he died in 1780) he became a shopkeeper.
He developed into the complete polymath, corresponding with the likes of Laurence Sterne, composing many songs and short pieces and writing letters to his wife Ann which became a best seller after his death.
Joseph begins in casual modern gear on a stage with an easel containing Gainsborough’s portrait of Sancho, a small podium, a rack of costumes and a sound desk. He begins by singing a couple of Sancho’s songs before setting himself the target of defining Sancho in 100 minutes – this eventually proves an inaccurate irrelevance. In the first half he links together his own experiences as a black Londoner growing up in the 20th century and Sancho’s equivalent life in the 18th century. It’s rather haphazard, but his hold on the audience never falters and his miming of dance routines (Sancho’s with a huge Irish drum) is fun.
In the second half, now the soul of elegance dressed as Sancho in the portrait, Joseph takes questions, but mysteriously they enable him to deliver two telling readings from the book which are the heart of the performance: the hustings for the 1780 General Election where he voted for Charles James Fox (apparently he had been the first Briton of African origin to vote in 1774) and the famous case of James Somersett, an escaped slave when Lord Mansfield’s ruling anticipated the events of 50 years later. A final question and answer session which followed without a break revealed Joseph’s great knowledge of his subject.
Accompanying such a semi-improvised evening is no doubt a strain on any musician/sound engineer, but Ben Park, with his odd stringed instrument and his pre-recorded sound, bears it all with as much cheerfulness as skill.
Reviewed on 14th November 2024
