Small Island review at the NT: A fabulous play about racial injustice
The small island is Jamaica but then again it is also Britain: this brilliant play explores the injustices faced by the people who arrived on our shores in the 1940s in search of a better life, only to be met with violence and hostility.
One of the play’s great strengths is how it makes audiences squirm, never flinching from the racist comments and actions levelled at Jamaican people by Britons. But then again, it also hooks its audience with a tone that, at times, feels so light it’s amazing that director Rufus Norris has pulled it off. I cried at the play’s darkest revelations, but bawled with laughter at the slapstick and farcical sequences.
We’re introduced to a set of characters connected by their dreams, and also by the systemic prejudice they will face. No matter how hard they try, the message is that the white man will always whimper first across the finishing line, whether he deserves to or not.
Unlike in Andrea Levy’s acclaimed 2004 novel, which jumps between historical periods, Helen Edmunson’s stage adaptation flows chronologically. In Jamaica we meet Hortense, the illegitimate daughter of a Jamaican bureaucrat and her husband, a working class man called Gilbert. The pair move to the UK, where he dreams of becoming a lawyer, while she is infatuated with the culture.
Juxtaposed to the Jamaican scenes is a confectionary shop in London where Queenie works. She’s a young, white, open-minded but uneducated butcher’s daughter who fled her family farm to work in the big city. There she meets Bernard, an uptight older man who coerces her into marriage and then signs up with the RAF, leaving the other three to flat-share together.
Levy paints a grim picture of Britain in 1948, when mixed black and white households were unusual and blacks having jobs typically occupied by white people commonly led to racism and violence.
The production hinges on three immense performances. Leonie Elliott gesticulates as if she’s slicing saucisson with her bare hands as the formidably steely Hortense. Gilbert is played by Leemore Marrett Jr, who is a genius at traversing from physical comedy to tragedy, nailing the character’s burning desire to do right. Queenie is played with a touch of musical theatre by Mirren Mack as she saunters, youthful and confident, across the stage, helping everyone she can, and calmly spouting profundities in a way anyone trying to be profound never could. They’re supported by a couple of thigh-slappingly good supporting comic characters, not least Bernard’s dad Arthur, played by David Fielder.
The only let down is the staging, which never quite keeps up. A contemporary design by Katrina Lindsay relies too heavily on video projections, which feel cold and don’t play to the strengths of the National Theatre’s giant Olivier stage. The physical pros aren’t much better; I think the idea was for doorways, shop counters and cinema chairs, which dart on and off stage from above, to look cute and handmade, but it feels too minimal. The National Theatre is cash-strapped so it’s likely that the sets, and bringing this show back in general, was a cheap option for producers – and who would blame them when it’s this good?
Despite this, Small Island devastatingly conveys what the logical conclusions of small mindedness can look like. Its allegorical title forces introspection as we draw obvious contemporary parallels, and wonder what damage today’s versions of these bigots can do.