Given the National Theatre’s reported lockdown losses of £50 million, not to mention its more recent Covid woes and the all-out flop that was Manor (in the Lyttelton), it’s hard to overstate how much the theatre needs this revival of Small Island – skilfully adapted by Helen Edmundson from Andrea Levy’s classic novel about a Windrush couple in post-war London – and back in the Olivier after wowing crowds in 2019. Yet it was programmed long before Covid laid waste to Hex, the National’s hoped-for Christmas spectacular in the same theatre, evidence perhaps that Rufus Norris’s biggest challenge during his tenure has been finding shows with the scope and pizazz to inhabit London’s largest subsidised stage.
No matter. It’s terrific to see it again, a tragi-comic dance through a pivotal moment in British history as Leonie Elliott’s amusingly snooty Hortense and her ebullient new husband and RAF veteran Gilbert arrive in England from Jamaica at the tail end of the 1940s. The expansive Gilbert (Leemore Marrett Jr, excellent) dreams of becoming a lawyer; Elliott’s equally good, lofty Hortense, who in a deft bit of colourism critique from Levy has always considered herself “golden” because of her pale skin, imagines a teaching career and her own front door.
Instead, they find a whole lot of hostility and a one-room bedsit in Earl’s Court run by Mirren Mack’s sunshiny Queenie, a pig farmer’s daughter from Lincolnshire who has married the emotionally strangulated Bernard with similarly rose-tinted dreams of a new life in London. Across three buoyant hours, the hopes and disillusionments of both couples parallel and contrast each other, as a drab, war-shattered England insists on its own bigoted reading of empire and its legacy.
Norris’s whirligig, beautifully acted production makes extravagant use of the Olivier’s theatrical toy box while remaining clean and uncluttered. The revolve stage and lovely choreographed ensemble scenes suggest a world in unstoppable flux, trap doors become a slick comic device, while swish black-and-white archive footage whooshes us from a Kingston chicken shed to a bombed-out London terrace.
Yet a single door frame summons up an entire room, the movement of chairs through the air depicts the 1944 Jamaican hurricane, while the first people to board the Windrush do so in simple poignant silhouette. Amid the broader swirl, there are moments of highly detailed intimacy, be it Queenie’s first encounter with Bernard in a London sweetshop, or Hortense’s God-fearing uncle and aunt in Kingston who won’t brook talk of Darwin at the dinner table, each scene conveying in a few deft strokes tiny human dramas within the onslaught of history.
