Small island, national’s olivier theatre, review: a gripping state-of-the-nation epic

Dominic Cavendish Theatre Critic 02 May 2019 12:11pm BST Since it was first published 15 years ago, the late Andrea Levy’s novel Small Island has reached (and enthralled) a substantial

number of people. It was a multi-award-winning bestseller, and in 2009 it was made into a BBC two-part film that garnered praise for bringing Levy’s complex, emotive tale of wartime upheaval

and postwar, Windrush-generation migration into a Sunday evening slot usually reserved for bonnets and bodices drama. Yet I don’t think it’s overstating things to declare that in this

inspiring adaptation, which compresses the book into a gripping three-hour state-of-the-nation epic – how “we” were then, prefiguring who “we” have become now – Small Island has found its

ideal home. This feels like a landmark for the National (and a defining success for Rufus Norris’s sometimes troubled regime); it invites everyone to contemplate, and celebrate, a crucial

chapter of our history; and it has been realised by a world-class creative team and first-rate multi-racial ensemble that makes you proud to be British.  Proud – eventually. Along the way,

during an evening that often has you swinging between bursts of laughter and incipient tears, there are moments that may bring crimson shame to the cheeks of a white British onlooker. 

Smartly scripted by Helen Edmundson, with playful yet careful direction from Norris, it doesn’t stint on relaying the shocking racist sentiments of the period. Yet what’s striking is that

this isn’t an extended guilt-trip. Combining individual experience with communal encounters, love across the racial “divide” and enmity in the battleground of belonging, the show

acknowledges struggle and strife on all sides, flies the flag for compassion and achieves a hard-won (and still to be fought for) inclusivity. To begin at the beginning, we’re on the lush

island of Jamaica. “God Save the King” is chalked on the blackboard and prim, proper English teacher Hortense (a wonderfully stand-offish Leah Harvey) is contending with the departure of her

childhood sweetheart. This is her cousin Michael (CJ Beckford), with whom she has been harshly raised and whose illicit passion for a white American lady and patriotic fervour for the

“motherland” have seen him head to Blighty to serve as an airman. Her only ticket out is a marriage of convenience with another RAF-man, affable Gilbert (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), who leaves

one small island for a hallowed heart-of-Empire destination cursed with an insularity of its own, but not blessed with sunshine.  With much fluid scene-setting on a nimbly furnished stage

(assisted by spell-binding newsreel footage, projections and ambient sound) we’re drawn, increasingly, into the lair and related life-travails of Aisling Loftus’s Queenie. She has escaped

drudgery on a Lincolnshire pig farm for a new start in London, via a job in a sweet shop and the cold, comfortless arms of a bank-clerk (Andrew Rothney’s Bernard). The war sets her off on a

life-changing journey of her own: without wishing to give too much away, her name feels quietly loaded  – she boldly takes West Indian lodgers into her Earls Court home, and is in the heart

of things as London’s black community of today is born. Given the exceptional performances across the board, it feels invidious to single out individuals, but Loftus, has never been better;

Harvey subtly registers disdain, dismay and slow-flowering acceptance; while her black male co-leads combine swallowed hurt with defiant charisma as their characters confront stiff-upper-lip

froideur and outright xenophobic hostility in staking a humble claim to the land they have fought so hard for. Suffice it to say: Small Island, massive achievement. Highly recommended.

UNTIL AUG 10. TICKETS: 020 7452 3000; NATIONALTHEATRE.ORG.UK. THERE WILL BE AN NT LIVE BROADCAST TO CINEMAS ACROSS THE COUNTRY ON JUNE 27