‘Now’s a great time for actors from ethnic minorities’’
Paterson Joseph tells Jake Kerridge about going from Johnson in ‘Peep Show’ to his new role in an epic Proust adaptation
Paterson Joseph seems to have been involved in every epic radio drama event in recent years bar Lynda Snell’s annual pantomimes in The Archers. He has played the lead roles in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus and Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for Radio 3, and on New Year’s Day in 2015 he made Radio 4 listeners forget their hangovers in a 10-hour dramatisation of War and Peace, beautifully capturing the mixture of naivety and nobility of the central character, Pierre Bezukhov.
The same team behind the Tolstoy adaptation – writer Timberlake Wertenbaker and director Celia de Wolff – have now collaborated on a radio version of another European doorstopper, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over the course of 10 hours over the bank holiday weekend. Joseph is in the cast again (alongside Derek Jacobi and Simon Russell Beale), playing Charles Swann – a character once summarised by Anthony Powell as a “tart-fancying womanising manabout-town”.
Joseph has
enjoyed a wide-ranging career on stage, film and television, but his beautiful voice – deep but with a light, quicksilver quality – makes him a perfect radio actor. And, he tells me, on the radio he can play parts that would not otherwise be open to black actors.
“I’d never get cast as Swann or Pierre Bezukhov on television, not in a million years – well, certainly not in my lifetime. The joy of radio is that I can play a little old lady from Scotland if I can do the accent.
“It was the only thing I could do at school: I was rubbish at everything else but I could read aloud. It was the only thing I didn’t get caned for or told I was stupid. So I’ve loved doing it all my life.” He’s great in the Proust adaptation as the well-connected, dandyish Swann, falling for the slightly dim ex-courtesan Odette (played by Bessie Carter), scandalising the bourgeoisie and, to a lesser extent, the beau monde. Joseph conveys perfectly the bewildered rapture of a man who comes to admit that “the greatest love I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style.”
“I love Swann. I think he’s a broken soul,” says Joseph. “He’s erudite, he’s got amazing taste, he’s attractive, he’s loved, and yet he’s got this sort of emptiness in him and that makes him vulnerable. He’s never been touched by love, and so when this woman comes out of left field she takes his rationality away, takes his confidence away, and at first he’s so obsessed with her that he cannot see her, he cannot touch her. I think that’s a very common trap for a middle-aged man.”
Is Joseph, now 55, speaking from personal experience? Despite having recently “popped out of ” a marriage of 20 years, he says not. “I’m thinking of other characters I’ve played, like Othello. Shakespeare was writing about this general, the middle-aged achiever who’s done everything but never experienced love, and it will take him out because he doesn’t know how to deal with it. The love that you can get into when it’s the last knockings is deep, much more powerful for an older man than for a Romeo of 16.”
Making the complexities of Proust accessible seems like such a comically hopeless task that Monty Python even made a sketch about it, but Joseph is proud that the adaptation pulls it off.
“The marvellous thing about Proust – although it must have been a nightmare living in his head – is he forgot nothing. His obsession with detail is extraordinary, the way the sun plays on a room, the smell of the air. He’s like Van Gogh, seeing things in a way that no one else has seen them before. But what Timberlake does, as she did with War and Peace, is scale it back and humanise it. We’re being immersed in this rich soup of detail but we’re being told a story too.”
Proust was the most securely closeted of homosexuals, and references to homosexuality are somewhat coded in In Search of Lost Time. Joseph is pleased that some of Proust’s unpublished stories, written in the 1890s and dealing more directly with homosexual love, are finally being made available.
“It feels to me like almost a new genre is emerging, hidden histories – transgender stories, gay stories, women’s stories, working-class stories and ethnic-minority stories in British history. It’s a great moment, the feeling of all these works uncovered. It’s a rich time to be writing and to be an actor and to be involved in all this.”
Joseph has made his own contribution to the genre with his oneman stage play about Ignatius Sancho, the former slave who became the first black Briton to be allowed to vote. He wrote that play for himself, he says, as “a sort of semi-protest” against the fact that he was unlikely ever to be cast in a historical drama on television. But since it was first staged in 2011, the situation has improved somewhat.
“There’s a desire now to have multiethnic casts in many, many things, even in costume drama, which I’m very, very pleased about. My hope, my conviction is that in the 31 years that I’ve seen the profession changing and shifting and being conscientious and then forgetting itself, this feels like a period of momentum that cannot be stopped. I really think that it’s a better time to be an actor from an ethnic minority than we have been in for many a decade.”
There was a time when it looked like Joseph might become the first black Doctor Who – he was the bookies’ favourite to take over from David Tennant in 2009, although the role went to Matt Smith. Would he still want the part?
“I think there’s room in me now to do it – I was slightly reluctant then in that I wasn’t well-known and it would have been all I’d ever be known for. But I feel like I could do it, having
‘The marvellous thing about Proust is that he forgot nothing. His obsession with detail is extraordinary’
seen Peter Capaldi kill it – my son is 16 and he’s his favourite doctor. I always thought of Doctor Who as being an older guy – Jon Pertwee was mine – older than me now and somehow slightly dangerous. You need him to get through these situations because of everything he’s seen and experienced, but you can never quite trust him or ever really know what he’s thinking.”
There’s no question of the role that Joseph has become best-known for – Mark Corrigan’s insanely alpha male boss Johnson in Peep Show, famous for his deadpan delivery of lines such as (on his Tai Chi routine): “It should take 45 minutes, I’m done in 10. Stick that up your dojo.”
The show eventually ran for nine series, and Johnson lives on in memes and Youtube clips. Joseph takes pride in having stuck by it when it looked far from assured of being a success: “I thought, nobody’s going to be watching this, we’re looking down the camera, we look ugly as hell, this is awful, aesthetically really unpleasing.
“My agent kept saying, do you want to keep doing this, it’s a tiny show? But I said, I love this, I laughed more filming this than in the whole of the rest of the year.”