Quarantine Theatre: National Theatre at Home: Small Island

Small Island I love you! Andrea Levy we need you to come back or atleast more writers to follow in your wake. This wonderful drama, based on the novel by Andrea Levy, follows a cast of characters migrating to the Mother Country during the post-War Windrush era. Creatively using a stripped down set and filmic backdrops, as well as an amazing revolving stage, the drama begins with the arrival of Hortense to her adopted family and meeting with her glamorous cousin Michael Roberts. Hortense fights her way to England in a marriage of convenience to Gilbert, following her cousin who has joined the RAF and never come home. Gilbert and Hortense end up renting a room in a house of Queenie Blyth, abandoned by her soldier husband Bernard.

The glorious thing about this drama is that there is no cancel culture here. Characters are shown as a mixture of good and bad qualities, prejudices and cultural confusions - no-one is completely unlikable or unreedamble; as in life the good and the bad are jumbled together. Even the more heartless characters are given suggested reasons for their motivations, words or behaviours - it's a subtle piece.

And yet some of the language is shocking, genuinely shocking. The prejudices and assumptions are horrible or just plain wrong, and yet Andrea Levy never completely writes a character off as wholly bad. A stiff upper lip, very racist husband can be good at lulling crying babies or tender towards a suffering soldier comrade's family. People's hearts and thoughts are exposed and almost forgiven, or left to us to see them for what and who they are. And what are we to make of all this confusion?

It is painful to watch, to see people coming with hopes and dreams, and to have them snuffed out or snatched away. But it isn't hopeless, there is still hope and reconciliation, and still opportunities to dream. There is so much joy, humour, fun in the cross-cultural confusion, such as walking into broom cupboards thinking that they're the exit; Hortense's gravitas and snobbery; the uncooked chips; using the sink for everything, and how grateful I am that we don't have horrible housecoats to wear now!

I'm left thinking about the damaging way Hortense uses her words; about Gilbert's long sufferingness; about how people become unlikely friends because of their new circumstances; of how badly treated people invited to this country were - how we snatched away dreams and hopes and put up so many barriers and gave them the worst - housing, jobs, experiences, then complained about it and blamed them, and lumped people all together as 'them'. England, Small Island, I could wring your neck you stealer of hope and crusher of dreams. And yet, still, so many have been able (inspite of all of this) to dream dreams, live lives, build families, succeed and thrive, or do their best at the jobs we demean or scorn, but which have made them frontline heroes now. There is hope, it's a bitter hope, but there is still hope and compassion.