‘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
Arts
Reaching heights of dizzying
excitement with Simon Rattle
L
urking in the depths of the
classical music ocean are
leviathans that are normally
too impractical or expensive for
orchestras to take on. One of the great
virtues of the Proms is that because of
the Albert Hall’s huge, galleried space
and the institution’s financial clout, it
can – sometimes – bring these beasts
to the surface.
We saw one of them on Tuesday
night, at the London Symphony
Orchestra’s Prom. Edgard Varèse’s
Amériques was the centrepiece of an
evening of ear-drenching orchestral
colour and rhythmic excitement, of
the kind Simon Rattle, the orchestra’s
music director, does so well. He
opted to perform the original, madly
extravagant version of Varèse’s great
musical dream of America, complete
with offstage brass septet, crow-call
and boat-whistle. It was worth it, as
these exotics humanised the awe-
inspiring cityscape and prompted a
ripple of laughter, which the composer
wouldn’t have minded (the humorous
side of Varèse is often overlooked).
But what really lifted the
performance was the exquisite
attention to detail of both players and
conductor, and the subtle way they
balanced those sinister ticking factory-
scapes and craggy brass chorales. This
revealed the grandeur and pathos
of the piece far better than mere
ear-splitting force could have done –though there was no shortage of that
in the build-up to the apocalyptic
ending.
Before that we were treated to
another, only slightly less extravagant
rarity: the vision of the anarchic
monkeys in Kipling’s Jungle Book,
as pictured in Les bandar-log, by the
French composer Charles Koechlin,
from 1940. The piece is also a satire
on the modern world’s never-ending
pursuit of the fashionable, particularly
among composers. Rattle and the
orchestra relished the angular
parodies of “12-note music” and
neoclassicism so much they actually
became enjoyable, but it was the
jungle-at-twilight mystery of the
ending that clinched the impression of
a true, neglected masterpiece.
The final piece, Walton’s
Belshazzar’s Feast, is hardly ararity. But it’s certainly rare to see it
performed by three choirs, as it was
here, with the orchestra’s own chorus
joined by the famed Orfeó Català
choir and youth choir from Barcelona.
The result was a choral sound of
magnificent depth and power.
Together with the weighty, dignified
recitation of the story from baritone
Gerald Finley, the electrifying playing
from the orchestra, and Rattle’s
superb sense of timing, it made for a
performance of dizzying excitement.
Rarely has Belshazzar’s humbling by
the Almighty seemed so satisfying.Prom 44LSO/Rattle
Royal Albert Hall, London SW7★★★★★
By Ivan HewettExquisite attention to detail: Rattle conducting the London Symphony OrchestraP
aterson 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 man-
about-town”.
Joseph hasenjoyed 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 womanCHRIS CHRISTODOULOUwho 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 aboutIn Search of Lost Time begins on Radio
4 on Saturday at 2.30pm. It is also
available as a boxset from Saturday via
the BBC Sounds appSee this concert on BBC 4 on Friday at
7.30pm. Listen for 30 days on BBC
Sounds. The Proms continue until
Sept 14. Details: 020 7070 4441;
bbc.co.uk/promsblack 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 multi-
ethnic 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, havingseen 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.”
Leading man: Paterson Joseph, top in the title role of his play Sancho: An Act of Remembrance, and below as Johnson in Peep Show‘The marvellous thing about
Proust is that he forgotnothing. His obsession with
detail is extraordinary’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 ofProust’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 one-
man stage play about Ignatius Sancho,
the former slave who became the first
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foraThe Daily Telegraph Thursday 22 August 2019 *** 23
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