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Review of Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, by Paterson Joseph, co-directed by Simon Godwin, Pemberley Productions with the Oxford Playhouse, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, December 16-20, 2015.
Sancho: An Act of Remembrance is a one-man play, written and performed by British actor Paterson Joseph. The play is inspired by the extraordinary life of writer and composer Ignatius Sancho and, more broadly, the long history of African diasporic subjects living in Britain. Sancho is typically known by literary scholars for his jocular letters, particularly his epistolary exchange with Laurence Sterne. Sancho, Josephs first play, casts the eighteenth-century Afro-Briton not as a footnote to English literary history but rather, as a serious historical subject with wide-ranging aesthetic interests. In the co-production by Pemberley Productions with the Oxford Playhouse at The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Sanchos musical compositions laced the background while his love of theatre and acting manifested in Josephs joyous performance. As a result, Joseph's play not only nodded to Thomas Gainsboroughs 1768 painting of Sancho (a replica of which graced an otherwise stark stage with wooden crates): it provided a living portrait of a black Londoner who held the attention of his contemporaries.
The play is the product of Josephs encounter with Gretchen Gerzina's Black London: Life before Emancipation (Rutgers University Press, 1995), a study of the presence of black people living in eighteenth-century England. The play is also Josephs response to early accounts of black life, which have been configured largely around the paradigm of slavery in North America. Indeed, Sanchos story adds another dimension to the cultural legacies of slavery in the Atlantic world, and it gestures...