by SHAILESH SOLANKI
ANDREA LEVY’S seminal novel chronicling the experiences of first-generation Jamaican immigrants comes to life in this powerful adaptation by Helen Edmundson at the National Theatre.
Small Island is a rollercoaster of a play, a tinderbox of high energy grappling with the emotive and highly charged themes of hope, love and racial identity.
Edmundson’s three-hour-long adaptation revolves around two strong-willed and indomitable female characters whose lives are entwined across the islands of Jamaica and Britain.
We first meet Hortense (Leah Harvey), a pale-skinned, prim school teacher in the middle of a hurricane in 1940’s Jamaica. When her unrequited love for her cousin Michael seems to end with the outbreak of the Second World War, she takes up with the happy-go-lucky Gilbert, played with gusto and panache by Gershwyn Eustache Jnr. They share a deep desire to emigrate to England, a land offering a golden future to all its citizens.
“Hinglaand is the future,” says Gilbert in a deep Jamaican accent.
Aisling Loftus’s Queenie, meanwhile, is a kind-hearted country girl desperate to escape her humdrum life on her father’s Lincolnshire farm. She comes to London to work for her aunt in a confectioner’s shop where she meets and marries the dull and emotionally repressed Bernard.
The ravages of war bring the characters together. Michael and Gilbert both enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and become lodgers (at different times) in Queenie’s large house in Earl’s Court, much to the dismay of her husband and neighbours, who accuse her of harbouring “coons”.
When Hortense joins Gilbert for her “golden life” in England, the betrayal of the mother country begins to unravel, from her drab living quarters – the all-in-one kitchen, bedroom and dining room with no toilet – to the stark racism of Britain’s streets, where she’s called a “darkie” within a day of arriving.
Gilbert, who harbours ambitions of becoming a lawyer, has to confront the everyday blue-collar bigotry of the postal service, where he’s constantly asked, “When you going back to the jungle?”
Levy’s novel is sweeping in its scope, tracing the roots of the Windrush generation and examining the pre-war circumstances which brought them to Britain.Director Rufus Norris stays true to her work as the play hurtles back and forth into the story of the main characters.
Katrina Lindsay’s set uses the vast Olivier stage to great effect, capturing the havoc of the hurricane and the destruction of the war to the disconsolate life of post war London with seamless ease.
Its unvarnished portrayal of the racial tensions in post-war Britain is brutal, emotive and tearful in equal measure. The promise and betrayal of first-generation immigrants is handled with sensitivity yet reveals the bare-knuckled reality of the vicious racism steeped in every aspect of British life, a country where “darkies should cross the street” when they see a white woman and where rooms for rent “are closed to black boys”.
Edmundson grasps these issues with verve and humour. When Gilbert is given a pie by Queenie for his troubles, he says: “That’s the first thing I ate in England which does not taste like it’s been eaten before. The English boil everything.”
But it’s the stoicism and single-minded determination with which the characters handle both their changed circumstances and racism that shine through in this brilliantly evocative adaptation.
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Small Island is running at the National Theatre until August 10. The play will be broadcast by NT Live on June 27.
