Released on National Theatre at Home to mark Windrush Day 2020 – named for the HMT Empire Windrush which first brought Jamaican immigrants to Tilbury docks in 1948 – Small Island is an epic tale of small, isolated lives. Adapted by Helen Edmundson from the novel by Andrea Levy (born in London to Jamaican parents), the hugely successful production, directed by Rufus Norris, premiered at the National’s Olivier Theatre just last year.

With a cast of 40, it plays out the stories of three very different narrators – Hortense, Queenie and Gilbert – whose intersecting lives encapsulate themes that remain all too pertinent still. The first half recounts their early lives up to the onset of World War Two; the second half finds them attempting to make lives for themselves in post-war England. A quaint pre-war newsreel, depicting the Caribbean, West Indies, Jamaica and Kingston through a British colonial lens, serves as a prologue to orientate us to those times.

The play proper begins in rural Jamaica with a literal rush of wind: a hurricane, manifested with giant projections (designed by Jon Driscoll), awe-inspiring sound (Ian Dickinson) and shadow-playing lighting (Paul Anderson). It’s hurricane season. Classroom assistant Hortense (Leah Harvey) is at home with such elemental forces and knows what to do but also has to cope with her newly-arrived English superior, school-mistress Mrs Ryder (Amy Forrest), hyper-excited at experiencing her first hurricane.  

Thus, we are alerted to notice, as the play proceeds, where true power lies, in nature, within cultures and in man-made history. Abandonment and displacement versus seeking security, not least with a place to call home, will also emerge as uniting themes.

Treasured by her Grandmama, Mrs Jewel (Sandra James-Young) for her golden skin, but abandoned by her mother (presumably pale-skinned), who has gone to Cuba, and her Jamaican father, who lives in Kingston, young Hortense (Keira Chansa) joins the household of her father’s brother, the God-fearing authoritarian Mr Philip (Trevor Laird). Nevertheless, she enjoys childish adventures and learns the principles of reciprocation (or utu, as we know it in NZ) with her lively young cousin Michael (Shaquahn Crowe) – until he is sent to boarding school.

When grown-up and educated Michael (CJ Beckford) counters his father’s biblical beliefs with Darwinian science, all hell breaks loose and Hortense’s love for her cousin deepens. But he is intent on going to England and joining the RAF – and now we discover the hurricane involving Mrs Ryder is also a metaphor for Hortense’s emotional response to what has transpired.

We first discover Queenie (Aisling Loftus) falling foul of her husband, Bernard (Andrew Rothney) for donating their surplus furniture to the local Rest Centre (supporting refugees from the Blitz). From here she narrates her “story of deliverance” from a pig farm and butchery in Lincolnshire to the bright lights of London and work as a shop girl, thanks to her Aunt Dorothy (Beatie Edney). In contrast to Hortense losing the love of her life, Queenie has made the mistake of allowing uptight Bernard to take her out, because he buys The Times so must be a gentleman, then marrying him to avoid returning to the pig farm.

They live in Earls Court with Bernard’s shell-shocked father, Arthur (David Fielder), endure unsatisfactory conjugal relations and suffer a spectacularly unnerving night of bombing. When Bernard enlists for a desk job with the RAF, then, Queenie is not exactly distraught. And when a neighbour, asks her to put up a flight crew – two Englishmen and a Jamaican called Michael – for a couple of weeks before they go off on active service, of course she says yes.  

Mention must be made of the extraordinary staging devices employed at the Olivier, allowing for fluid transitions from scene to scene, each evoked with minimal furnishings and props (Katrina Lindsay, who also designs the unobtrusively excellent costumes). Doorways and items of furniture simply rise from the massive revolve and fall again with fluent ease; sliding doors open in the back wall invariably awash with projected imagery. And always the lighting and sound is perfectly placed and pitched with the large cast of supernumeraries invariably employed to ensure the human dimension is always to the fore.

The third narrator, Gilbert (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), also from Jamaica and serving with the RAF, as a truck driver, first appears beating up an American GI. He knows it’s not what he was taught by his mother but enjoys it all the same. We subsequently find out why. As it happens Gilbert’s training camp is in Lincolnshire where Queenie has taken her father-in-law Arthur, to get him away from the traumatising bombing raids – and it’s Arthur who becomes the conduit for Gilbert meeting Queenie. Their visit to the pictures, to see Gone With the Wind (another bit of Windrush wordplay) ends in real-life tragedy caused by bigotry.  

Gilbert’s backstory picks up his connection with Hortense – it starts at a political rally – and tracks how he, then she, come to emigrate to England. He has ambitions to become a lawyer and she is already an experienced teacher. The departure of the Empire Windrush from Kingston brings the first half to a spectacular conclusion.

The second half explores the realities of post-war life in the much-vaunted ‘Mother Country’ for black immigrants from the colonies. While the nature of class-based hierarchies within Jamaican households are clearly depicted in the play’s early scenes, the higher standards Hortense has concerning living conditions are now contrasted with what renters in England can expect. Ironies about amid the insights that are to be gleaned every step of their ways.

To say much more about how the final hour plays out would be to spoil the twists, turns, pay-offs and surprises that writers Levy and Edmundson, director Rufus Norris and the whole onstage and backstage team have so skilfully crafted into this production of a richly inter-twined tale. Trust me, no matter how much you think you know about this era, you will come out understanding more. Small Island clearly rates as a classic in that the particular lives and times dramatised here speak to timeless and universal truths that resonate all too powerfully in today’s news cycles.

See it here (starting no later than 3am on Friday 26 June, NZ time)

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