Paterson Joseph is, by his own admission, an unlikely opera librettist. He had turned 50 by the time he got round to going to one, and only went because he was in it, as the “crazy” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” says the actor. But therein lies part of his mission: as a black Londoner written off by the school system, his life was transformed by the goldmine he discovered while truanting down at his local library.
One of his discoveries, as “a melancholy teen”, was Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it out of the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book. And I started reading this poem out loud, at night in my bedroom. And I laughed – but I was also frightened and frustrated, weeping at the tragedy of it. When I closed the book, it was dawn.”
He laughs as he recalls where his enthusiasm took him next – tracking down a cassette recording of the Tchaikovsky opera, complete with the libretto. “I’m laughing because I nicked it,” he explains sheepishly. “But that’s one opera I know inside out, even though I’ve never seen it.”
Since arriving on the scene in the late 1980s, Joseph has rarely been out of work, from playing borderline-fascist loan manager Alan Johnson in Peep Show to starring as the villainous Slugworth in Wonka. But in between jobs, Joseph has taken every opportunity to pass on his belief in the transformative power of culture. In 2004, he made a TV documentary about staging Romeo and Juliet with a cast drawn from the streets of Harlesden, London, near where he grew up. More recently, he became chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, on a ticket of inclusivity. He also won an award for his 2022 debut novel, The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, about the first black man to vote in Britain.
His one-man show based on Sancho’s diaries will accompany his latest project: a trio of short operas created with 64 homeless people in Manchester, London and Nottingham, due to play in those cities over the next three months as part of a celebration by Streetwise Opera of Britain’s African and Caribbean heritage. Rehearsals have taken place in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, London’s Southbank Centre and the Nottingham Playhouse. “It was great,” he says, “because these places aren’t where homeless people wander in to see stuff. So them being out of their comfort zone was interesting. Their confidence in who they were was really palpable when I got in the room.”
He was expecting tales of rejection and struggle. “But they just wanted to tell stories of romance, superheroes and fantasy, and things that happened in the 18th century. They wanted to do a Shakespearean thing. And I thought, ‘Of course, why would you want to relive your own traumas?’ That’s the whole point, isn’t it, of acting and performing? This isn’t me: I’m being somebody else. Their delight was infectious.”
Over a series of improvisations, it became clear that the interests of the three troupes were different, so the operas are too. The Nottingham group were keen on gags, which they poured into a piece about about love, fish suppers and a loo. London were into the showbiz side of composers of African and Caribbean heritage, while Manchester took an interest in the city’s activist history, going back to the Peterloo massacre. Each piece is performed by the homeless people themselves. “You don’t get to be homeless,” says Joseph, “unless something kicks off in your life. And you don’t get out of it unless you’ve got something about you. These people are like a kaleidoscope of humanity.”
Joseph’s own life story began in west London in 1964, the fifth of six siblings born to parents who had both immigrated, separately, from St Lucia. His dad was a plasterer for the council while his mum worked at a McVitie’s factory. “I know a lot about biscuits,” he says. His older sisters, meanwhile, loved playing teacher with him so that, by the time he enrolled at school, he knew quite a bit about reading. But this didn’t stop him from being written off and he left without qualifications. “I rejected school,” he says, “because it rejected me. From day one, I was made to think I was stupid, when it was totally based on ethnicity.”
At 13, a friend pointed out that he could always bunk off, which was how he found himself hanging out in Willesden Green library. “It was a safe place,” says Joseph, now 59. “I wasn’t going be seen by anybody. I’d be in the reference section with the men who liked to drink in the day, only I’d be actually reading.” Although he is angry on behalf of all of his peers, whose lives were blighted by racist exclusion, he is not bitter on his own account. “I wouldn’t have swapped that for a formal education. I wouldn’t recommend it – I got lucky. But it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
It wasn’t until Joseph joined a youth theatre that he met any middle-class people, let alone any who weren’t white. He recalls kicking plastic oranges around the living room to the theme tune of the sitcom Rising Damp when suddenly an actor with a plummy voice started to hold forth. His name was Don Warrington. “There was this black man being very erudite and educated. And I remember just stopping, with my mouth open like a dog hearing a whistle, thinking, ‘I don’t know anybody like that. And yet he seems to be real.’”
He found his way into an unaccredited drama school, where he was introduced to the writing of theatre visionaries Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. By 18, he had started to write – stories about his parents’ generation and his own, as well as “strange abstract plays, because of what I was imbibing at that time”. If he could give one piece of advice to his younger self, he says, it would be this: be confident. “It’s such a simple thing,” he explains. “But life is a confidence trick. And I don’t mean confident on the outside. I mean, if you’ve written something, be confident that it’s good and keep working on it. Don’t do what I did, which is just stick it in a drawer for 20 years.”
He went on to conventional drama school and, within two years, was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. TV parts had started rolling in, and he made his film debut in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, where he met his French wife, Emmanuelle. Their son, Glenn, was born on the day he began rehearsals for Elmina’s Kitchen, a play for the National Theatre by Kwame Kwei-Armah, set in a West Indian restaurant.
“That was an extraordinary show. Because when you have kids, you start to look at life with a very, very different perspective. You start to wonder what kind of world you’re bringing them up in and who you’re going to be as a parent. What’s his identity going to be? He’s half white, half black, but born in Britain to French Caribbean-British parents? I started to look at my own life, my own world. I laughed at Frankie Howerd and Steptoe and Son. I also listened to calypso and reggae. But I am an Englishman. I think that’s when I really started taking writing seriously.”
Simultaneously, he was informed by a casting director that he had “comedy bones” and made his debut on Peep Show. A year later, he was in Green Wing. “That was a whole new world of attention.” What does Glenn make of his dad’s success? I don’t know what he makes of any of what I do,” he says – except that about a month ago, Glenn went into a French store and was chuffed to find Slugworth immortalised as a toy. “He rang up to say, ‘Dad, I haven’t told you this before, but I think you’re doing really well.’”Recalling that encounter with Don Warrington in Rising Damp, Joseph says: “It’s important to me to play British people, especially in films or TV series that might be widely seen, because it gets people used to the fact that there is a black Britain.” It was this impulse that took him off in search of Charles Ignatius Sancho. As he points out in the novel’s introduction, a black man in the 18th century who became a writer, composer and an early abolitionist seems deeply incongruous to many people. “Congruity is my aim,” he writes, expressing a desire to correct the impression that “Windrush was the start of black British history on these islands”.
All nations, he says, tell themselves stories. “It’s important to do so, but we hardly know about anybody except white and middle-class men. If those stories leave out women, if they leave out third gender people, if they leave out global majority people, then it’s only half the story.”
In the last couple of years, Joseph has also finally accepted that he is indeed a writer, one with a burning question for everyone: where do you belong? “I want to tell you your history,” he says, “because part of your history is this country. It’s not banging a drum, I don’t do polemics. But I am interested in story. And all of these working-class stories are really just beginning to come up, because there are working-class people who’ve got their hands on a pen and some time. We’re going to get richer as a nation, I think, showing the full picture.”
• Sancho & Me by Paterson Joseph and Opera Express by Streetwise Opera are at the Re:Discover festival, St John’s Waterloo, London, 27-28 May; Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, 7-8 June; and Nottingham Playhouse, 19-20 July
