It was really difficult to tell where Paul Robeson ended and Lenny Henry began. The one-time stand-up comic was playing the black singer with the uniquely deep and passionate voice in Sunday night’s Drama on 3. Annie Caulfield’s intense, intimate play, I’m Still the Same Paul, looked at what happened to Robeson (1898–1976) after he came under surveillance because of his outspoken speeches demanding civil rights in America and his dubious enthusiasm for Stalin. ‘Whatever he thought was private in his life, we heard it. We knew it,’ says one of the spies who tailed him.
Henry was just brilliant as Robeson; one of the best performances in a radio play I’ve heard in a long while. He just drew me in, his voice close to the microphone, talking not to every listener but just to me. It’s as if Henry has been a radio actor all his working life. He made me really believe it was Robeson talking and that what I was listening to were the illicit tapes recorded by Hoover’s team of FBI agents, not a group of actors reading from a script in a soundproof studio.
The drama seamlessly wove together documentary recordings of Robeson singing and speaking at meetings in America with a fictional retelling of his story, as seen through the eyes of a former agent who spent decades tailing Robeson. Michael Vincent is now looking back through the old tapes to find out whether there is anything in them that could justify why Robeson is brought back from Moscow, a broken man. What really happened in the dripping bathroom of a Moscow hotel? Was Robeson drugged to break his spirit? A much safer way to get rid of him than simply hiring someone to shoot him?
The politics of civil rights and the frightening, out-of-control power of the intelligence agencies were clearly spelled out, but only as the subtext to the very poignant story of Robeson’s decline from a powerful voice in music and in society to the weak and uncertain figure that he becomes.
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