NT’s Small Island is a captivating staging of epic Windrush tale – review
Small Island was a huge hit for the National Theatre in 2019 and, at the time, was greeted with rave reviews – it’s easy to see why, and it’s no surprise that it has been brought back so soon after the theatre’s re-opening.
Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel is an absolutely epic tale – clocking in at comfortably over three hours, it tells the story of Jamaican couple Gilbert (Leemore Marrett Jr) and Hortense (Leonie Elliott) as they arrive, via the Windrush, into a post-war London that gives them anything but a warm welcome.
It may be a lengthy play but it covers an awful lot of ground. Proceedings actually begin just before the Second World War and we gain a snapshot into the life of Queenie (the excellent Mirren Mack), who dreams of escaping her country life on a Lincolnshire farm and moves to London, marrying Bernard (Martin Hutson) out of convenience so that she has financial security to stay there.
When Bernard is sent away to war, Queenie takes in a variety of lodgers to get by; hers is a unifying role throughout the production, as it’s the various lodgers that she takes in that bring the disparate narrative strands of the play together.
