Small Island, National Theatre — a vibrant, generous triumph

Small Island

National Theatre, London

Why did we miss theatre when it was away? Small Island is why. This magnificent piece of theatre, first staged here in 2019, now returns even better than before: a story about who we are and how we got here, told on the biggest stage of the National Theatre. A vibrant, generous dramatisation of Andrea Levy’s great 2004 novel, it begins by making you smile and ends by breaking your heart.

Part of the genius of Levy’s novel is its narrative style. Telling the tale of two couples — one English, one Jamaican — brought together by the 1948 arrival in the UK of the Empire Windrush ship, it combines the great sweep of global events with the sharply defined voices of those caught up in them. We hear from Hortense, a prim Jamaican teacher, who arrives in London full of hope for her future; Gilbert, her husband, who joined the RAF in the second world war; Queenie, a kindly English butcher’s daughter; Bernard, her husband, whose war takes him to the partition of India. All four end up in London, when Gilbert and Hortense rent rooms from Queenie.

On the page, their experiences spring out in the first person, their prewar hopes colliding brutally with the grey reality and ugly racism of postwar London. The political force of the novel lies in the shameful impact on rich, flawed characters we have grown to love and care about. On stage, playwright Helen Edmundson and director Rufus Norris bring a new charge to that combination of the epic and the intimate as the characters confide in the audience, making us witnesses to a shared history.

There’s a mischievous joy to the staging that propels it along. Jon Driscoll’s evocative video designs, together with subtle lighting and sound work from Paul Anderson and Ian Dickinson, whisk us from sun-soaked, storm-tossed Jamaica to the splintered cityscape of war-torn London. Minimal props — a bucket of offal, a school blackboard, a cinema screen — sketch in changes of location; a vast projection depicts the towering ship that brings together the two couples.

But there’s also a restless sense of postwar turbulence and Norris retains the scope of the novel with a silent chorus of people on the move. Set against this, the four central characters are vividly defined by the superb new cast. Leonie Elliott’s excellent Hortense shows us the vulnerability and independent spirit beneath the brittle exterior; Mirren Mack’s neat and nimble Queenie matches her, combining a warm heart with an appealing directness. Leemore Marrett Jr’s Gilbert is witty, dignified and perplexed by the ignorance and prejudice he encounters. Martin Hutson, as Bernard, seems pinched and shrunken by his xenophobia.  

Painfully eloquent on the multi-layered, corrosive nature of racism and on the brutality of war (David Fielder is very touching as Bernard’s shell-shocked father), this outstanding, deeply humane show now plays out in the shadow of the Windrush scandal, of resurgent xenophobia and of a terrible new conflict.

★★★★★  

To April 30, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Henry V

Donmar Warehouse, London

At the Donmar Warehouse comes a much earlier scrutiny of the way national identity, war and power intersect. In Max Webster’s pulsating modern-dress staging of Shakespeare’s Henry V, with Kit Harington (Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow) at the helm, it becomes a piece about a leader gradually warped by power and calloused by war and a warning about the fool’s gold of jingoistic certainty.

Webster prefaces the action with a quick résumé of the story so far: we see snatches of Henry IV and the young prince staggering about with his Eastcheap pals. Cut to a more sober, suited-and-booted figure and we have a man with a hangover and a point to make. “May I with right and conscience make this claim?” Harington’s Henry asks, rather testily, of the bishop who has just subjected him — and all of us — to a tortuous PowerPoint on French lines of succession.

Once blessed with that assurance, he’s off — and there’s a terrifying gleam to him as he becomes ruthless and remote. His impassive execution of his old friend Bardolph is chilling. Given the numbers of the dead at the end of the battle of Agincourt, he barely glances at them.

There’s a tension throughout between the rhetoric and the reality (a former Royal Marine was consultant to the show). Fly Davis’s burnished gold backdrop yawns open to create a blazing flag of St George, contrasting with the ragged confusion and fears of the ordinary soldiers, the watchful scepticism of the courtiers (Kate Duchêne particularly excellent), the dry sarcasm of the Chorus (Millicent Wong) and the sombre portrayal of the French king, whose scenes are delivered in French with English surtitles. Anoushka Lucas’s smart Katherine makes very plain that marrying Henry is a duty, not a choice.

Harington, meanwhile, projects the brittle certainty of a man running from a deep-rooted sense of doubt. We end with declarations of victory, tight smiles and a pile of dead soldiers’ boots. A gripping, merciless reading that feels grimly apposite right now.

★★★★☆

To April 9, donmarwarehouse.com, international broadcast on April 21, www.ntlive.com