Small Island by the National Theatre

After work, I scurried home and had dinner so I could go out to the cinema for the encore streaming of the National Theatre's production of Small Island, based on the 2004 novel by Andrea Levy.

I've been a fan of Levy's work since the early noughties, but she wasn't well known until Small Island won the Orange Prize for fiction. I'd lent the set of 13 CDs to my sister when she was decorating her house, and she ended up going to the live streaming last month with her daughter, and raving about it. I'd been planning to go, but hesitated over the price. Once she'd convinced me of the merit, I vowed to find an encore streaming, and was lucky to stumble across a programme only yesterday, informing me that the repeat streiaming was tonight, for one night only.

For those that don't know the book, it's an epic, starting with the lives of Jamaican people in Jamaica in the 1930s, including those who fought for "the mother country" in the second world war, and who came to England as part of the Windrush generation. They didn't get quite the reception they'd imagined.

Also central to the story is Queenie, the white British farm girl who married an emotionally cold man to get off the farm. Her husband joins the RAF and then disappears after demobilisation, meanwhile leaving her to look.after his father, who's been suffering from.shellshock since the first world war. To make ends meet, Queenie starts letting out rooms in her London house to recent arrivals from Jamaica. The neighbours don't like it...

So, on the one hand it's a story about Empire, race and social attitudes. On the other, it's about ordinary working people, their lives, and the six degrees of separation.

If you get the chance to see the streaming or the theatre production in London, I heartily recommend it. Maybe even ten out of ten. I laughed, I cried, I clapped, and now I'm.goung to read the book again. What a pity that Andrea Levy died just before rehearsals began. In a televised interview after the another of her novels, the Long Song, was broadcast in December last year, she said that she had had incurable cancer for several years. She was oleased that she'd been able to enjoy the overnight success that Small Island had brought her. Her passion lives on through this latest interpretation.