Small Island: (stage Version) (NHB Modern Plays) - Softcover

A landmark in the National Theatre's history... skilfully adapted [with] hurtling energy... it shows theatre exercising a truly national function... superb... unforgettable. --Guardian

I don't think it's overstating things to declare that in this inspiring adaptation, which compresses the book into a gripping three-hour state-of-the-nation epic - how "we" were then, prefiguring who "we" have become now - Small Island has found its ideal home... Smartly scripted by Helen Edmundson, it doesn't stint on relaying the shocking racist sentiments of the period. Yet what's striking is that this isn't an extended guilt-trip. Combining individual experience with communal encounters, love across the racial divide and enmity in the battleground of belonging, the show acknowledges struggle and strife on all sides, flies the flag for compassion and achieves a hard-won (and still to be fought for) inclusivity... Small Island, massive achievement. --Telegraph

Levy's plot is terrific and it holds us in its grip. Adaptor Helen Edmundson and director Rufus Norris have honoured her intentions wonderfully in this all-encompassing and absorbing production... both deeply moving and profoundly shaming, a challenge to all small islands to open their minds and their human sympathy. From a novel dealing with the past, Norris, Edmundson and Levy have given us a play for today. --WhatsOnStage

Ferociously entertaining... Big, slick, pacy, above all confident entertainment, designed to be gripping and accessible and entirely succeeding... A historic epic that explores the arrival of the Windrush generation from both the perspective of the Windrushers and the first white people they lived with. It is very much about historical racism (not-so historical racism too); it is also about historical sexism... Edmundson specialises in literary adaptations, and she does some supreme work here, compacting a sprawling book into a pacy three-hours-ten-minutes. She has a knack for skilfully distilling story... It's the sort of show the Olivier was built for. --Time Out

A finely observed tale of displacement and conflict, love and loyalty, here brought to the stage with its warmth and poignancy intact... Small Island strikes a balance between moments of fragile intimacy and scenes of sweeping breadth. In the end this is a passionate engagement with the past that's sure to resonate at a time when the very idea of Britain is under such fierce scrutiny. --Evening Standard

Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots. In these three intimately connected stories, hope and humanity meet stubborn reality, tracing the tangled history of Jamaica and Britain. Andrea Levy's epic novel, adapted for the stage by Helen Edmundson, journeys from Jamaica to Britain in 1948 - the year the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. It premiered at the National Theatre, London, in 2019, directed by Rufus Norris.