00:12:24.720A play was the first way you wrote about him, yeah?
00:12:27.760Yeah, a monodrama, as they fancily call it these days. Monodrama.
00:12:32.480And strangely, even though I first performed it in its larger form, rough form, I suppose, at the National Theatre Studio here in London, well, in London, I ended up really only having a home for it in America for the first few years of its life.
00:12:50.040we were living in a post-racist world you have to understand i was told um in in that period and
00:12:56.560i'm talking about i finished the play originally in 2010 and 2011 i was looking for a home couldn't
00:13:02.820find a home i did it a bit in oxford at the playhouse there wonderful theater and they
00:13:06.640co-produced it with me couldn't find a home and then 2014 as i was looking for a home uh the first
00:13:12.900place that took it extraordinarily for me was the kennedy center in washington and um and i thought
00:13:21.900this was an old play people aren't going to be really an old story people aren't going to be
00:13:26.500interested in it and here's where my i suppose political awakening even though it is obviously
00:13:31.520a political story in some ways but it's more about celebrating his life that's what the play is about1.00
00:13:36.240i had these four african-american women who would probably be in their early 70s mid 70s
00:13:42.740some probably touching 80, who at the end of the play said, son, this idea that Sancho's looking
00:13:49.340for his papers to vote is not a news story. That's happening to us today. And it was such a
00:13:56.020mind-blowing. And you imagine having been told for the last decade that this was an old story,
00:14:00.560that this is a sort of dusty story that we've heard too much about and we don't want to...
00:14:04.880To be told by these women that the story of Sancho desperately trying to vote
00:14:08.400was their story opened my eyes to not only you know the fact that we do need these stories
00:14:14.540that that it's actually it's a personal story for today yeah and the novel came out of wanting
00:14:20.560to do something a little deeper which we can talk about if you like no i absolutely want to
00:14:24.680i'm curious about that so it was you in kind of the story you created this play so the decision
00:14:31.040to turn it into a novel i mean versus doing a non-fiction book how how did that how did you
00:14:36.820make that decision was it easy to decide well I suppose it was because that's my bag you know I
00:14:41.620do I do characters I play characters if anybody's ever seen anything that I've done um what I tend
00:14:47.760to do is what most um drama schools try and teach you to do or most good directors they get you to
00:14:53.480sort of hot seat in other words um you have to ask the question so um who are you and what are
00:14:59.140you doing and you say well my you know I'm I'm the prince and my my my father has just died
00:15:04.980so what's the problem well my i'm unhappy because my mother just married my uncle
00:15:09.860well that's shocking yes it is shocking and it's only a few weeks after he died so you sort of
00:15:14.960develop this sort of inner monologue uh or if anybody's seen my work on say um um a couple
00:15:21.600of shows that i've done in america timeless which is a time travel show i did for the nbc and for
00:15:26.060and the leftovers that i did on hbo rather than just present a character that you've just been
00:15:32.760given you just do the lines you have to think of a back story and so doing the play which is so
00:15:37.680forward-facing so front-facing it's like you meet Sancho himself being painted you're in Gainsborough's
00:15:44.280painting room as an audience member I talk to you as this man being painted and you wonder who I am
00:15:49.320and I start to tell you my story and I animate it with music etc and then you have him in the
00:15:56.400hustings as they were called which is the vote which is also a public show of hands you have
00:16:01.680the portrait which is a sort of performance I suppose by Gainsborough performance of a man the
00:16:06.940shocking performance of this black man and then you have his letters so few people could read and
00:16:12.220write so your letters weren't very private they were likely to be read to a family by the man or0.52
00:16:17.860the woman of the household again public letters that he wrote to the newspapers public music that
00:16:23.200is meant to be played in public I thought what was his and what's his interior life like so I did
00:16:28.680what i would do with hamlet or what i would do with you know brutus in julius caesar and i
00:16:34.640hot seated him made him tell his story from the inside and the novel seemed to be the best form
00:16:40.600the most intimate form of storytelling squiggles on a page become pictures in your head and and
00:16:47.020then they are almost permanent images that you have created indelibly uh in your head if you
00:16:52.900think about the first time you read Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, before you saw Colin Firth
00:16:59.180in his glory, you would have seen pictures of who your ideal Darcy was, your ideal Elizabeth was.
00:17:07.000And that's what I think the novel can do better than anything. So that's what I wanted. The diary
00:17:11.940form is towards his son, Billy, his final son, who was only five when Sancho died. And Billy's
00:17:19.680just been born I imagine at the beginning of these diaries and at the beginning of the book
00:17:23.920and he collates his life diaries so that Billy can know him when he's passed away and um Billy
00:17:30.680becomes an adult so there that's in a nutshell everything really well and I think it's such a
00:17:36.280really honestly like I love historical fiction and I think it's such a good way to really delve
00:17:41.180into these stories versus just being here's a list of dates and information who remembers dates
00:17:48.340I mean, I know that we've got a bunch of dates. We know what happened in 1776. We might know what happened in 1863 or 1864, but we might not know the details of it. And so it doesn't personalize it. I think we need images as human beings.
00:18:05.780I think we need them to be moving or even to be still, but we need to see them before we can remember them. And certainly, if you give me a bunch of statistics around an event, however tragic it is, unless I know a personal story within that, that's touched me as a human being, I may or may not remember it.
00:18:24.860I certainly may or may not be touched by it.
00:21:15.380And what's strange to me, what's really strange, Anne, is that you'll hear people defending to the death these sort of what they call an anti-woke.
00:23:04.080Interestingly, because this was a colony, America,
00:23:07.060it brought the slaves over in order to make sure that colony
00:23:11.620was working efficiently with cotton and all the other things it was making.
00:23:14.900Also, in the Caribbean, they had colonies,
00:23:17.940and that's where they grew their sugar and their sugar cane and rum.
00:23:22.820and tobacco etc and this idea that britain was somehow this angelic nation
00:23:29.720has sort of seeped through history for hundreds of years by the way not just recently and sort
00:23:34.480of seep through our consciousness so that when you see a wonderful colorful exciting show like0.88
00:23:40.140bridgerton you can imagine as i say in the preface black people brown people sashaying unmolested0.93
00:23:46.020through london that was not the case this was not the case at all so this is a sort of redrawing
00:23:51.020It's not propaganda. It's a story. It's like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield.
00:23:53.900But it literally is saying we need to you need to redraw your picture because it was a lot less easy than you might imagine.
00:24:02.580And Britain certainly was the master of slavery.
00:24:06.460And it was only when they had no choice in many ways financially and in terms of insurrections, the slave revolts that were increasing in the Caribbean.
00:24:16.020They had no choice but to end it. And then they blockaded other nations from getting slaves, but not through any altruism.
00:24:23.300It was simply we don't want them getting slaves so that they can have industries like we do.
00:24:28.740I mean, you know, it's the basis of the British Empire and the insurance companies like Lloyd's, Barclays Bank, Tate and Lyle, the Tate Modern, the Tate Britain, these wonderful institutions, which are they are wonderful and very philanthropic now.0.97
00:24:43.080But honestly, they were built on the backs of slave ship insurance.
00:26:40.060Kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered like bones in the dust.
00:26:45.060Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.
00:26:52.940But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins.
00:26:57.280This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.
00:27:00.480Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job.
00:27:06.660This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make.
00:27:14.220This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back.
00:27:18.960Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day.
00:27:29.520See what everybody's talking about and join us in the dark.
00:27:45.280You mentioned that Charles Sancho, he ran a grocery store and some of the products, like the products he sold were sugar, like things that were from the slave trade.
00:27:56.040Yeah. And when I did the one man show, I literally thought, I know he must have sold these goods. In fact, I see it in his letters and some accounts of them having to, you know, cutting blocks of sugar in the shop. How has he reconciled himself to this?
00:28:12.960And in the one-man show, I have 75 minutes, and I didn't feel that I had sufficient information to be able to tackle that.
00:28:21.020It was a sort of let's meet Sancho, an audience with Sancho.
00:32:38.020This is a black woman, probably born in London,
00:32:41.600certainly baptised in Whitechapel in London,
00:32:43.460who was also uh capable um of uh great uh sort of learning she was certainly educated her daughters
00:32:53.820so to sancho they could read and write you can find betsy his youngest daughter's letters in the
00:32:58.980british library so he was out of his time so finding this tavern which you see a lot of
00:33:04.460accounts of people coming to london and saying they were black taverns um i think they're
00:33:09.420presuming that they were only frequented by black people but i think that's hardly possible
00:33:12.980So I think it's probably they saw some black people in there. They would have been Chinese. They would have been people from the Middle East, Arabs. They certainly would have been Indians. Everybody from the far-flung corners of the diaspora and the British colonies and anywhere they traded with, they would have been there in these taverns.
00:33:40.900So I imagine the music, which they never describe. They call them Negro frolics and Negro hops. So even in that terms, you still hear life. There must have been life in there. There must have been something. But what was the music like?
00:33:55.440Can I imagine the Irish drum, which I play, the circular drum, which they also play in North Africa as well because of, you know, all sorts of trading routes from hundreds of years back.
00:34:04.080The circular drum with a little bone-like, it looks like a bone, but it's made of wood, the butter, playing that, that drum, like a table, and then flutes, and then the kora, the African instrument that looks a little bit like a cello.
00:34:20.720You could imagine also other percussion instruments, people who were violinists who worked for the theater, people who worked in the court as trumpeters.
00:34:29.020You would have imagined the music being very lively and the dancing to be lively.
00:34:32.580So I imagine him going into this setting, but not only that, meeting Anne Sancho, who becomes his wife in that setting, and really almost clinging on to this community because he finally, finally belongs somewhere.
00:34:46.060Well, and especially as he was a musical man himself.