“Small Island’s narrative is one of dichotomies: the metropole vs the metropole, Black vs white, savage vs civilised”

The beginning of the play is marked by a storm erupting on stage and seemingly breaking the calm of the Olivier Theatre (the largest of the three theatres at the Royal National Theatre). As the audience is caught in the brazen event, the overarching themes of conflict are immediately made known. This is especially pertinent considering the tropical nature of the Caribbean storm that shatters the National Theatre, a venue that typically showcases performances rooted in white British culture and history.

Small Island’s narrative is one of dichotomies: the metropole vs the metropole, Black vs white, savage vs civilised. It starts off by introducing two separate stories, which eventually coalesce. The first of these stories focuses on a Jamaican community, more specifically on the life of Hortense.

Hortense (played by Leonie Elliot, known for her role as Lucille Anderson in the BBC series Call the Midwife) is a well-mannered teacher who dreams of travelling to Britain to enjoy a life of luxury. She becomes deflated with life when her romantic interest, Michael Roberts (played by Elliot Barnes-Worrell), ends up having a relationship with a white woman, Mrs Ryder, who works as a teacher with Hortense. On the other side, Queenie (played by Mirren Mack) is a white woman from Lincolnshire who leaves the farm to travel to London in search of a new life. Queenie eventually gets married to a wealthy white man, albeit racist and boring, and finds herself living an unsatisfied life.

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The third main protagonist is Gilbert (played by Leemore Marrett Jr), who is introduced further in the play. Gilbert is a Jamaican man who joins the RAF during WW2 and is housed by Queenie. He then goes home to Jamaica in hopes of returning to Britain, to the distaste of his cousin Elwood who has a hatred for British society.

Hortense and Gilbert marry, and the play follows their migration to Britain in 1948, with Queenie becoming their landlord. The narrative reflects accurately the shattering of the dream that danced in the minds of many post-war Caribbean migrants when they discovered that the streets in Britain were not, in fact, “paved with gold”. Instead, those that settled had to lower their standards and expectations of what they could attain. Those who were respected and educated in the Caribbean, such as Hortense and Gilbert, were relegated to roles of thankless servitude whilst being repeatedly discriminated against and viewed as less than.

The sobering reality of this dismal experience of racism and oppression is expressed through the production, with a warm orange luminance on the stage representing Jamaica that is juxtaposed against dark and dingy surroundings to present life in the UK. Crowded props are also placed between a high metal stairwell, signalling the cramped housing conditions and subsequent criminalisation of Blackness via prison bars.

Helen Edmunson’s screenplay of Andrea Levy’s novel mirrors the exploration of misogynoir and colourism, with both Black male protagonists partnering with either white or light-skinned women, highlighting the multiplicity of marginalisation faced by the women of the Windrush generation. Small Island debuted at the National Theatre in 2019, two months after Levy’s untimely death, and is now returning from its COVID-10 induced hiatus. Its timing is significant, not just due to the book’s author’s passing, but as it comes shortly after the 2018 Windrush scandal and amid a worldwide racial reckoning following 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests. More recent events, like Barbados removing the Queen as its head of state and leaving the Commonwealth, with Jamaica potentially following suit, further contextualise the play’s complex racial dynamics. 

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Despite the production’s successes, however, it seems to have fallen in one major category: Black people are not telling their own narrative. With the creative vision shaped by a white male director and a white female scriptwriter, the play deviates from its origins as the brainchild of Levy, whose English and Afro-Jamaican heritage more acutely connect with the story’s historical framework and themes. Though credit must be given to the excellent visual manifestation of Levy’s written tale, its message of Black struggle and exploitation falls flat, as this was a missed opportunity to centre Black talent behind the scenes in the context of a whitewashed industry. The limitations were not just seen through the optics and scope to enfranchise but in the storytelling itself; we saw Queenie’s narrative receive more emphasis in the play than it did in the book, for example.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings in mind, Small Island remains a necessary watch in a socio-political climate still gripped by the aftermath of the Empire Windrush. The eruptive applause at the end is a testament to its frank and emotive production.