PATRICK MARMION by
Windrush saga captures a generation’s struggle and strife
Small Island (NT at Home, YouTube)
Verdict: Chastening Windrush saga ★★★✩✩
Joseph Knight(nationaltheatrescotland.org)
Verdict: A dream of escape ★★★✩✩ Hamlet (BBC4, Sunday 9pm, and iPlayer)
Verdict: RSC gives Denmark an Afrobeat ★★★★✩
SMALL ISLAND opened last year at London’s National Theatre in the wake of the Windrush scandal. Now, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the epic stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel feels more timely than ever.
But much as I admire Levy’s historical saga g about a young Jamaican woman who dreams of becoming a teacher in England after World War II, I still find the show hard to love.
In theory it’s got the lot. Powerful themes of ambition, war, and, yes, the shameful racism endured by so many post-war Jamaican immigrants.
My problem is with Levy’s heroine Hortense, who is a slightly cold, defensive and at one point needlessly cruel young woman.
This is no aspersion on Leah Harvey’s steely performance. She at least allows you to glimpse the discipline it takes for Hortense to be so ruthlessly determined. But that doesn’t make her any better company, and for me the three-hour story has a frustratingly cold heart.
OTHEr characters, including Aisling Loftus as Queenie, the Lincolnshire butcher’s daughter, provide more warmth. She opens her home to immigrant lodgers and takes one of them as a highly biddable lover. Before that, she marries a nervous bank clerk who turns out to be a gutless racist.
The story is redeemed by Gershwyn Eustache Jr as the cheerfully resilient rAF recruit press- ganged into marrying Hortense. He’s a man of warm appetites, good humour, and faith in others — all of which are sorely tested by myriad events, not to mention Hortense herself. If only
was the play’s protagonist. Even so, rufus Norris’s production is a tidy piece of social history with an eye-popping birth scene and a moving finale.
If the staging sometimes feels a tad austere, it also offers splashes of spectacle, with projections of Jamaica’s tropical mountains, the turbulent Atlantic Ocean, and the Windrush ship, which brought so many people, with such high hopes, to England.
MAy SuMBWANyAMBE’S short film Joseph Knight (part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s ongoing Scenes For Survival series), meanwhile, is a dreamy vision of someone who made the journey from Jamaica to Scotland some 200 years before the Windrush docked — as a slave.
In just four short minutes it captures the yearning to escape the past and the scars of slavery.
THE royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, from 2016, is set in the fictional African kingdom of Denmark, and it’s a ruse that gives the play new life. It helps you hear Shakespeare’s poetry afresh.
In the title role, Paapa Essiedu shows why he has become such hot property. His Hamlet is a moody painter modelled on New york graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Boyish and athletic, he brings great wit to the role and makes the language accessible.
If I have one reservation, it’s that he is a little too selfabsorbed… even for Hamlet. I wished he showed more interest in those around him.
Nonetheless, Simon Godwin directs a colourful pageant and Sola Akingbola’s music mixes African drums with the funk of Fela Kuti and hints of the blissful guitar of Ali Farka Toure.
The play within the play, which sees Hamlet catch his uncle out, is a particular delight, with ululating players taking the stage by storm.