Andrea Levy’s epic, Orange Prize-winning novel bursts to new life on the Olivier stage. A company of 40 tells a story which journeys from Jamaica to Britain, through the Second World War to 1948 – the year the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.
Adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson, Small Island follows three intricately connected stories. Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. Hope and humanity meet stubborn reality as the play traces the tangled history of Jamaica and the UK.
The latest chapter in the ongoing scandal around the treatment of the Windrush generation - immigrants who arrived in the "mother country" from the West Indies in the late 40s and early 50s - is still being written, with a group of over 80 MPs referring the Home Office to the Equality and Human Rights Commission only this week to investigate whether its "deeply discriminatory" hostile... Read more
