CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
Small Island
National Theatre at Home
HELEN EDMUNDSON’S stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s hugely successful and epoch-defining novel Small Island was rapturously received at the National Theatre in 2019.
Now being streamed during lockdown, this brave and deeply truthful story demonstrates how and exactly why black lives matter.
Set in the 1940s, the play charts the arrival in England of refined and educated young black Jamaican woman Hortense. She and her husband Gilbert lodge in the London home of the white Queenie in a post-war London rotten with racism.
MARY CONWAY applauds the timely revival of Miller’s study of people fatally deformed by the economics of survival
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying
Although this production was in rehearsal before the playwright’s death, it allows us to pay homage to his life, suggests MARY CONWAY
MARY CONWAY applauds the success of Beth Steel’s bitter-sweet state-of-the-nation play


