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. Robeson believes he is bigger than the establishment that is trying to break him; his wife (movingly portrayed by Adjoa Andoh) knows different. I’m Still the Same Paul was directed by Claire Grove. (If you missed Henry in this performance, you can hear him tonight as Othello on Radio Four.)
Over on Radio Four, David Hare scripted a new play for radio based on the memoir of Craig Murray, the troubled former British ambassador to Uzbekistan. Murder in Samarkand (Saturday night) was another political drama, based on true events, and with a plucky individual also pitted against an overweening establishment — in this case the British Foreign Office. Murray, you may recall, turns ‘local’, defending Uzbeks against the cruelties of the Uzbek dictatorship and alerting Whitehall to the fact that all the intelligence being given to the CIA and MI6 by their Uzbek informers is based on torture.
The timing is crucial: Murray arrives in Tashkent in early 2002. Murray is warned by the US ambassador when he starts to complain about human rights, ‘We need Uzbekistan. Since 9/11 we’re fighting a war by all means available. Uzbekistan is our ally…We need military bases from which we can go out and fight the worldwide war on terror…In a war you cannot choose your allies. We wouldn’t have chosen the Soviets in 1941…’
It’s one man against a callous behemoth. One flawed man. With a much wiser wife (crisply dispatched by Lia Williams). Much like Robeson. Except in Robeson’s case we saw the dignity, the humanity, the pathos. With Murray he just came across as so very dislikeable — in spite of, or perhaps because of, being played by David Tennant. Instead of a maverick British diplomat, I kept on seeing in my mind a fantastical Doctor Who. There was no way I could take him seriously.
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