Paterson Joseph

You’ve come back here for the second year running.
Being at the National again is a shock, actually, as I didn’t think I’d come back for a couple of years. It was wonderful doing The Royal Hunt of the Sun, but I’d only just finished The Emperor Jones a month or so before I started rehearsing that, and Royal Hunt was a long job. I thought I’d give it a rest for a little while. But then I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Was that the one to do The Emperor Jones again?
No, that wasn’t the offer! It was for St. Joan. I didn’t know anything about plans for The Emperor Jones to be done again at that point. But I love [St Joan director] Marianne Elliott—we did Les Blancs together at the Manchester Royal Exchange—and I thought that the character of Cauchon was nothing like I normally play, so I wanted to do it as a challenge to myself. Then about two weeks after I accepted that, I got a call from Thea [Sharrock], who directed The Emperor Jones, and she said, “Guess what?” And I said, “Whatever it is, I’m sure I can’t do it as I’m doing St. Joan.” And she said it was at the National, too, and it was to do the play again. I was completely blown over. She then said, “Guess where?” I said the Cottesloe instantly. She said no, so I said Lyttelton and thought, that’s going to be a challenge. She said no! And then I realised it was the Olivier, and I thought, “No way!” And I’ve had that conversation with everyone I’ve said it to since. But when you think about it, it’s not a small play—O’Neill didn’t write it for a tiny theatre.

Paterson Joseph in The Emperor Jones at the Gate Theatre

It’s just that the way you did at the Gate was so remarkable. [It was staged with the audience seated around the entire perimeter of a rectangular box and looking down on the action.]
It will not be like that again! It was a practical decision based on the space that we had. With one scene following rapidly on another, we had to deal with the practicalities of that space, which often brings up genius ideas. I’ve never worked in a theatre space like it. But it can’t be like that again unless you completely reconfigure the Olivier and only have 64 people seeing it. It was a very specific and wonderful thing, and I’ll never forget it. But we have to in some ways put that to bed and remember the essence of what we were trying to do but put it away, and start anew. Physically, it will be very different for me and very different for the audience.

The Emperor Jones is rarely seen. What attracted you to it?
Actually, I knew this play already. The first drama school I went to, Studio 68 Theatre Arts, which no longer exists, was run by an 80-year-old American called Robert Henderson, who found this play for me. He recommended it as an audition piece. I remember picking it up and reading it and thinking I couldn’t make sense of it—it was written in phonetics. But then I spoke it out loud and it was fine. It became my audition piece until I left LAMDA.

How did the chance to finally do a full production come up?
Thea came to me 20 years later and suggested we do it. I said I’d like to, but I wasn’t sure it was right anymore—it was very different looking at it as a 19 year old and as a 40 year old, and I couldn’t square myself with it. I wasn’t sure I knew what it was saying. Thea said she felt exactly the same way but thought there was something compelling about it. So we started investigating it and having done a small part of it and knowing how powerful it was as a piece of theatre, I was drawn to it again. I realised it was a great play to do. It’s a scary subject: a white playwright writing a play in phonetic African-American and old English cockney, set on an island where an African-American criminal becomes primitivised and stripped of his Western dignity. That is exactly what the play is about—showing Western man being stripped of all the paraphernalia of what makes him so powerful. I think it is not surprising that his name is Jones. He’s a sort of everyman of various types: a criminal type, an oppressed type, an African-American of the ‘20s. He’s looking at who he thought he was, what his ancestry was and his history was.

Paterson Joseph in The Royal Hunt of the Sun

There’s the whole legacy of slavery, too—which is a big strand to the African-American experience.
It is, and to the black experience generally. The black Diaspora has to acknowledge that slavery has had its repercussions, and if we don’t, we are robbing ourselves. I’m not saying it’s an excuse for criminal behaviour or cruel behaviour, and Jones is guilty of both, but you can see the underlying causes of that behaviour and why he falls into it. Its also a very colonial way of being—the way he talks about people on the island and the way he talks about himself and how he exalts himself in order to put them down, is a very colonial attitude. It speaks to a lot of situations.

Speaking to audiences about their own experiences is a big part of an actor’s job. That was the case with Elmina’s Kitchen, Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play, in which you appeared in the original cast at the Cottesloe.
What’s extraordinary to me is that when I watched the audience at the curtain calls, I was moved to tears. I could see these young black people just looking at us and saying thank you for showing us. Every night of the week in every theatre in this country, that’s what the general white theatre audience gets—they get to see stories about themselves. That is why we go to the theatre and that is why we want to tell these stories. We’re a storytelling species, we want to see ourselves and our stories played out. As a black actor, I’d like to see more black plays. I don’t need the actor to be black, but I need the story to speak to me, and what is wonderful is when the story does both—when there are both black people up there, a black audience and a black story. It’s wonderful to see that and be a part of it. Elmina’s Kitchen was a really important moment for me as an actor and for theatre generally.

When it went to the West End, however, Kwame himself played your part. I remember being moved by the fact that at the curtain call on the first night, the cast actually applauded you, watching it in the stalls.
Did they? I must have wiped that out of my memory! But I do remember that the first five minutes were the hardest moments of my life in the theatre. I was on, but I wasn’t on, and someone else was doing what I was doing. I love the play, and I love Kwame. I’m so looking forward to his next.

His plays up to now specifically address the black experience. What’s great nowadays is the amount of colour-blind casting in the theatre, particularly at the National.
Theatre is leaps and bounds ahead of television in so many ways and has always been. Nick [Hytner] has always been particularly good at being controversial. When we did The Recruiting Officer here, and I played Mr. Worthy [directed by Hytner in 1992], someone from the sponsors came up to a do afterwards and didn’t recognise me and said he enjoyed the play, but it took him a while to get used to the idea of there being black people in England at the time. I pointed out that there were about 25,000 black people in England then, and some were even in the gentry. Then I asked him if he believed in the actor playing the part? He said, yes, the actor was fine. And that’s what it’s about. It’s not a documentary, after all. And now I’m playing Bishop Cauchon in a Shaw play, and I thought I’d never do Shaw.

Paterson Joseph in The Emperor Jones at the National

Do you think there are more opportunities for black actors nowadays?
Yes, I would say so, though TV and film have some catching up to do. They tend to tell stories that, when it comes to race, are very limited in their imagination and scope. What’s happened though is that my generation—second-generation Afro-Caribbean—decided to become actors and there was a rush of us coming out in the ‘80s, and the profession wonderfully just went, “Oh, you guys are good, you have a facility for this, so let’s get you in.” There’s been a real opening due to the pressure of numbers and skilled practitioners coming in.

Was theatre in your blood?
God, no! Dad was a plasterer. He’s retired now and fishes instead. And my num was a cleaner in a hospital, the Royal Free in Hampstead.

What about your siblings? Did any of them go into the business?
I have four sisters and a brother, and none of them are in the theatre profession, though a couple are in the media. One sister, Jacqui, is a TV presenter.

Did you always have your heart set on becoming an actor?
No, I was originally a chef at the Royal Free, but I hated it. I had done a play at school when I was about 10. I was Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist, and I remember I just loved the reaction I got. I was crap academically, so it was great to hear people say that I was good at something. But I grew up incredibly shy, and when I went to a youth theatre at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, I liked the confidence of everyone there. I saw these 15 or 16 year olds who were much more confident than I was, and whatever they had, I wanted to get some of it. It was to do with being able to articulate things and starting to feel that I could express myself and be understood.

Can you still cook?
I can cook some things. I do a good Caribbean stew, chicken with domplin—spelt with an “o” and no “g” at the end—and I can cook a mean omelette.

But for now it’s the National that’s become your creative home, where you cook up great performances instead.
I’d like to think so. I really love it here. It’s a great place to work. It may look formidable for the outside, but the way its run is wonderful. Whatever Nick has been doing here, he has really made everyone feel part of the machine, where everyone works together and not separately.