Small Island - Brossura

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

ANDREA LEVY(1956 2019) was an English author best known for the novels Small Island (2004) and The Long Song (2010). She was born in London to Jamaican parents, and her work explores topics related to British Jamaicans and how they negotiate racial, cultural and national identities.

HELEN EDMUNDSON's first play, Flying, was presented at the National Theatre Studio in 1990. In 1992, she adapted Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for Shared Experience, for whom she also adapted The Mill on the Floss in 1994. Both won awards - the TMA and the Time Out Awards respectively - and both productions were twice revived and extensively toured.

Shared Experience also staged her original adaptation of War and Peace at the National Theatre in 1996, and toured her adaptations of Mary Webb's Gone to Earth in 2004, Euripides' Orestes in 2006, the new two-part version of War and Peace in 2008, and the original play Mary Shelley in 2012.

Her original play The Clearing was first staged at the Bush Theatre in 1993, winning the John Whiting and Time Out Awards, Mother Teresa is Dead was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2002 and The Heresy of Love was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Swan Theatre in 2012.

Her adaptation of Jamila Gavin's Coram Boy premiered at the National Theatre to critical acclaim in 2005, receiving a Time Out Award. It was subsequently revived in 2006, and produced on Broadway in 2007. She adapted Calderon's Life is a Dream for the Donmar Warehouse in 2009, and Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons for the Bristol Old Vic in 2010, which subsequently transferred to the West End before embarking on a national tour in 2012.

Her adaptation of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin was premiered by the Theatre Royal, Bath, in 2014, and was subsequently produced on Broadway by Roundabout Theatre Company in 2015.

Her original play, Queen Anne, was commissioned and premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015, and her adaptation of Andrea Levy's Small Island was staged by the National Theatre in 2019.

She was awarded the 2015 Windham Campbell Prize for Drama.