Fiona Ferguson

Patrice Naiambana offers me a huge hand and a deep bass “Hello” that rattles the crockery in the café at the new Courtyard Theatre in Stratford. I  can imagine he’s an impressive Warwick – the role he is currently playing in Henry VI Parts I,II and III for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The blue-blooded English aristocrat is, however, actually about as far as you can get from Patrice’s West African griot roots, but hey, all the world’s a stage. This two year contract with the RSC has not only meant a shift in cultural artistic practice for Patrice, but also a changing dynamic in his relationship with God, as he begins to explain: “I gave my life to Christ after many years of questioning. When I was invited to a big meeting in Peckham – they were teaching the word of God and everything fell into place. I went every single day for months and met my wife there. We were so in the thick of it – evangelising in the streets, fasting and praying, and devouring the Word. But that consistency has been massively shaken up by working absolutely non stop with this job, and now we have three children as well!”
“In eight months I’ve been to church about six times! At first I was thinking, ‘What are they going to think of me?’ and as a Christian I do feel like I must put my best foot forward all the time, but I‘ve realised that this my walk; there’s no set, perfect way to behave. It’s not about putting on the right show. Jesus died for all of me, even when that’s a me that can’t go to Bible study because I’m working, or a me that loses my temper in rehearsals. If you believe that God has given you the job then you’ve got to believe that somehow he’s in it. And God is everywhere! I had a karate teacher who used to say, ‘Sometimes I’ll be walking the streets of London and I’ll just look up and say, ‘Pappa God – help me!’’ And I sometimes all I can do is the same thing – just ‘Pappa God – help me!’ The arts can be a hard place – no matter how nicely people smile at you, you don’t really know what they’re thinking. It’s a cultural thing – growing up in West Africa people would tell you what they think, whereas here they won’t.”
But the challenges posed by crossing cultures have also opened up a deeper understanding of the richness of God’s grace to Patrice: “In this job I was initially very insecure as I was obviously the most inept in the room at verse. At first I was very defensive, saying that it wasn’t my culture, but then I thought, ‘Well, I can learn from this.’ My faith came in a lot – the challenges made me turn to him whenever I could (‘Pappa God – help me!’) Your individual discipline can be thrown, but God’s grace is always been there just at the point where everything has gone sky high! And God abounds far beyond the confines of our conventional understanding; his truth is waiting in the wings at the RSC just as much as in a church on a Sunday.”
“The Bible is all over Shakespeare’s work!” Patrice exclaims. “All great stories uncover the human condition and there is no area of the human condition that anyone could dream about that is not in the Bible already, so any dilemma a character I’m playing goes through encourages me to turn to the Word for inspiration. When I was playing Aslan for the RSC I went to the passages on the Garden of Gethsemane.” ‘Pappa God – help me!’ indeed.