MICHAL BONCZA recommends a minimalist installation that prompts intriguing connotations
Latest editorial
Racism writ large in Small Island
MARY CONWAY recommends a resonant drama on the fraught experiences of post-war black migrants in Britain
EXCELLENT: Leah Harvey as Hortense
FIONA O’CONNOR questions the achievement of this year’s Orwell prize winner for political fiction
LEO BOIX reviews two powerful Latin American novels in which myth and crime fiction expose the deadly consequences of patriarchy, clandestine abortion and state violence
New releases from Laura Veirs, The Waterboys, and Yard Act
Ron's rages are sincere and — according to his wife — healthily cathartic. But can these splenetic outbursts loosen the grip of capitalism at its most monstrous?
ANGUS REID considers the power of the podcast as a vehicle for consensus building in opposition to mainstream media narratives
Small Island
National Theatre at Home
HELEN EDMUNDSON’S stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s hugely successful and epoch-defining novel Small Island was rapturously received at the National Theatre in 2019.
Now being streamed during lockdown, this brave and deeply truthful story demonstrates how and exactly why black lives matter.
Set in the 1940s, the play charts the arrival in England of refined and educated young black Jamaican woman Hortense. She and her husband Gilbert lodge in the London home of the white Queenie in a post-war London rotten with racism.
Similar stories
GEORGE FOGARTY is dazzled by a breathtakingly skillful puppet version of Shakespeare’s greatest love poem
MARY CONWAY applauds the timely revival of Miller’s study of people fatally deformed by the economics of survival
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying
Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY