MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Racism writ large in Small Island
MARY CONWAY recommends a resonant drama on the fraught experiences of post-war black migrants in Britain
EXCELLENT: Leah Harvey as Hortense
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ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Small Island
National Theatre at Home
HELEN EDMUNDSON’S stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s hugely successful and epoch-defining novel Small Island was rapturously received at the National Theatre in 2019.
Now being streamed during lockdown, this brave and deeply truthful story demonstrates how and exactly why black lives matter.
Set in the 1940s, the play charts the arrival in England of refined and educated young black Jamaican woman Hortense. She and her husband Gilbert lodge in the London home of the white Queenie in a post-war London rotten with racism.
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