MAYER WAKEFIELD is entertained but let down by an audacious production that, sadly, doesn't ring true
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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
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by drama that, despite accomplished performances, cannot overcome an unfocused script
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KEN COCKBURN traces the one original language – that of the Yamnaya pastoral nomads – from which all European and Indian languages derive
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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.
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