PJoseph Utterson, by his own admission, is an unlikely opera librettist. He was 50 by the time he went to the opera, but only because he was playing the “mad” voice of God in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. “It’s not my world,” the actor says. But therein lies part of his calling: as a black Londoner overlooked by the school system, his life was transformed by a gold mine he discovered while slacking at his local library.
One of his discoveries during his “melancholic teenage years” was Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. “I remember getting it from the library,” he says, “just because it was a small book, and then at night in my room I started reading the poem out loud, and I laughed, but at the same time I was scared and frustrated, and I cried at the tragedy. I closed the book at dawn.”
He laughs at the memory of his next obsession: digging out a cassette tape of a Tchaikovsky opera complete with libretto. “I’m laughing because I stole it,” he explains sheepishly, “but it’s an opera I know inside and out, even though I’ve never seen it.”
Since breaking onto the stage in the late 1980s, Joseph has been busy with work, whether it be playing borderline-fascist loan manager Alan Johnson in Peep Show or villain Slugworth in Wonka. But in between, Joseph has always taken the opportunity to share his belief in the transformative power of culture. In 2004, he made a TV documentary in which he staged Romeo and Juliet with a cast drawn from the London neighbourhood where he grew up, Harlesden. More recently, Chancellor of Oxford Brookes Universityon the ticket of inclusivity. He also won the prize for his 2022 debut novel, “The Secret Diary of Charles Ignatius Sancho,” about the first black man to vote in the UK.
His one-man show, based on Sancho’s diary, will accompany his latest project, a trilogy of short operas he created with 64 homeless people from Manchester, London and Nottingham. The operas will be performed in these cities over the next three months as part of Streetwise Opera’s celebration of Britain’s African and Caribbean heritage. Rehearsals took place at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, London’s Southbank Centre and Nottingham Playhouse. “It was fantastic,” he says. “These are not places where homeless people just pop in to see something, so it was interesting to get them out of their comfort zone. When I walked into the room, it was really clear that they were confident in who they were.”
He had expected a story of rejection and struggle, “but they just wanted romance, superheroes, fantasy and things that happened in the 18th century. They wanted to do something Shakespearean. And I thought, ‘Of course I don’t want to relive my trauma, do I?’ Isn’t that the whole point of acting and performing? This is not me. I’m going to be someone else. Their joy was contagious.”
Over a series of improvisations, it became clear that the three companies had different interests, as well as opera. Nottingham’s was keen on gags, which it incorporated into its works on love, fish and toilets; London was interested in the show business side of African and Caribbean composers, while Manchester was intrigued by the city’s activist history, which dates back to the Peterloo massacre. Each piece is performed by homeless people themselves. “You can’t be homeless unless something has happened to you in your life,” says Joseph. “And you can’t get out of it unless you’re something that’s your own. These people are a kaleidoscope of humanity.”
Joseph’s own life began in west London in 1964. He was the fifth of six children, and both parents had emigrated from St Lucia; his father was a plasterer for the city hall and his mother worked in McVitie’s factory. “I know a lot about biscuits,” he says. His sisters, meanwhile, loved to play his teacher, so by the time he started school, Joseph knew quite a bit about reading and writing. But still, he was abandoned, and left school without a qualification. “I refused school,” he says. “Because the school rejected me. From day one I was made to feel stupid, and it was entirely based on my ethnicity.”
At 13, he started hanging out at Willesden Green library after a friend pointed out he could skip class whenever he wanted. “It was a safe place,” says Joseph, now 59. “No one saw me. I was in the reference section with a bunch of blokes who liked to drink during the day, and I was the only one who actually read.” He’s angry on behalf of all his classmates whose lives were ruined by racist exclusion, but he doesn’t resent it for himself. “I wouldn’t trade it for a formal education. I don’t recommend it. I was just lucky. But it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
It wasn’t until he joined a youth theater group that Joseph encountered middle-class people. He never encountered people who weren’t white. He recalls being kicked around a plastic orange in his living room to the theme tune of the sitcom “The Rising Dump” when suddenly, an actor with a royal voice began speaking. His name was Don Warrington“There was a very knowledgeable, cultured black man. I remember standing there with my mouth open like a dog that has heard a whistle and thinking, ‘I don’t know anyone like that, and yet he seems so real.'”
He attended an unaccredited drama school, where he was exposed to the work of theatre pioneers Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski. By 18, he was writing stories about his parents’ generation, his own, and “weird abstract plays, thanks to what I was drinking at the time.” If he could give one piece of advice to his younger self, he says it would be to “have confidence.” “It’s very simple,” he explains. “But life is about self-doubt. And I don’t mean outwardly self-confident. If you’ve written something, have confidence that it’s good writing, and keep writing. Don’t let it sit in a drawer for 20 years like I did.”
He went to a conventional drama school and within two years was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Television roles started to come his way and he made his film debut in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father, where he met his French wife Emmanuelle. His son Glenn was born the day he started rehearsals for Kwame Kwei Armah’s National Theatre play Elmina’s Kitchen, set in a West Indian restaurant.
“It was a great show because when you have a child, you look at life in a totally different way. You start thinking about what world you’re raising him in and who you are as a parent. What will his identity be? He’s half white and half black but born in England to French-Caribbean British parents. I started to look at my life, my world. I laughed at Frankie Howerd and Steptoe and Son. I listened to calypso and reggae. But I’m British. I think that’s when I started to take writing more seriously.”
At the same time, a casting director told him he had comedy talent, and he made his debut in Peep Show. A year later, he appeared in Green Wing. “It was a whole new world of attention.” What does Glenn think about his father’s success? “I don’t know what he thinks about what I’m doing,” he says. However, about a month ago, Glenn went to a French store and was thrilled to see Slugworth immortalized. toy. “My dad called me and said, ‘Dad, I didn’t tell you this before, but I think you’re doing really well.'” Recalling his meeting with Don Warrington on The Rising Damp, Joseph says, “It’s important for me to play a British character, especially in a film or TV series that can be widely seen, so that people get used to the fact that there is a black Britain.” This impulse led him to seek out Charles Ignatius Sancho. As he points out in the novel’s preface, a black man who became a writer, composer, and early abolitionist in the 18th century seems to many to be highly incongruous. “Integrity is my goal,” he writes, expressing a desire to correct the impression that “the Windrush was the beginning of the history of black Britain in these islands.”
Every country tells its own story, he says, and “it’s important to do so, but we know very little about people who aren’t white and middle-class men. If that story excludes women, if it excludes people of the third gender, if it excludes the world’s majority people, then that’s only half the story.”
In the last few years, Joseph has finally accepted that he is a writer, a writer asking everyone a burning question: “Where do you belong?” “I want to tell your history,” he says, “because part of your history is this country. I’m not a shouter, I’m not a polemicist, but I’m interested in stories. And these working-class stories are just starting to surface now, because there are working-class people with pens and time in their hands. I think we’re richer as a country by giving the whole picture.”
