Small Island (NT at Home, YouTube)
Verdict: Chastening Windrush saga
Small island opened last year at London’s National Theatre in the wake of the Windrush scandal.
Now, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the epic stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel feels more timely than ever.
But much as I admire Levy’s historical saga about a young Jamaican woman who dreams of becoming a teacher in England after World War II, I still find the show hard to love.
In theory it’s got the lot. Powerful themes of ambition, war, and, yes, the shameful racism endured by so many post-war Jamaican immigrants. My problem is with Levy’s heroine Hortense, who is a slightly cold, defensive and at one point needlessly cruel young woman.
With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the epic stage adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel feels more timely than ever. Pictured: Leah Harvey plays Hortense
This is no aspersion on Leah Harvey’s steely performance. She at least allows you to glimpse the discipline it takes for Hortense to be so ruthlessly determined. But that doesn’t make her any better company, and for me the three-hour story has a frustratingly cold heart.
Other characters, including Aisling Loftus as Queenie, the Lincolnshire butcher’s daughter, provide more warmth. She opens her home to immigrant lodgers and takes one of them as a highly biddable lover.
Before that, she marries a nervous bank clerk who turns out to be a gutless racist. The story is redeemed by Gershwyn Eustache Jr as the cheerfully resilient RAF recruit press-ganged into marrying Hortense.
He’s a man of warm appetites, good humour, and faith in others — all of which are sorely tested by myriad events, not to mention Hortense herself. If only he was the play’s protagonist. Even so, Rufus Norris’s production is a tidy piece of social history with an eye-popping birth scene and a moving finale.
If the staging sometimes feels a tad austere, it also offers splashes of spectacle, with projections of Jamaica’s tropical mountains, the turbulent Atlantic Ocean, and the Windrush ship, which brought so many people, with such high hopes, to England.
Joseph Knight (nationaltheatrescotland.org)
Verdict: A dream of escape
Rating: 
May Sumbwanyambe’s short film Joseph Knight (part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s ongoing Scenes For Survival series), meanwhile, is a dreamy vision of someone who made the journey from Jamaica to Scotland some 200 years before the Windrush docked — as a slave.
In just four short minutes it captures the yearning to escape the past and the scars of slavery.
Hamlet (BBC4, Sunday 9pm, and iPlayer)
Verdict: RSC gives Denmark an Afrobeat
Rating: 
Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, from 2016, is set in the fictional African kingdom of Denmark, and it’s a ruse that gives the play new life. It helps you hear Shakespeare’s poetry afresh.
In the title role, Paapa Essiedu shows why he has become such hot property. His Hamlet is a moody painter modelled on New York graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Boyish and athletic, he brings great wit to the role and makes the language accessible.
In the title role of Hamlet, Paapa Essiedu shows why he has become such hot property
If I have one reservation, it’s that he is a little too self-absorbed… even for Hamlet. I wished he showed more interest in those around him.
Nonetheless, Simon Godwin directs a colourful pageant and Sola Akingbola’s music mixes African drums with the funk of Fela Kuti and hints of the blissful guitar of Ali Farka Toure.
The play within the play, which sees Hamlet catch his uncle out, is a particular delight, with ululating players taking the stage by storm.
Reasons To Be Cheerful (graeae.org)
Verdict: For hardcore Dury fans only
Rating: 
Ian Dury once sang ‘a seasoned up hyena could not have been more obscener’, so I am recommending this pottymouthed jukebox musical with plenty of precautions.
Performed by the UK’s leading disability theatre company Graeae back in 2017, it’s strictly for hardcore Dury fans. If you are one, you’ll still need to forgive (and forget) plenty of this clunky, anti-Tory, agitprop yarn about a couple of punk rockers trying to get to a Blockheads gig in Hammersmith in 1979, while one’s father is dying of cancer.
On listening to a (carefully selected) excerpt, my 16-year-old daughter labelled Dury a rap artist. I suspect he may be one of the UK’s greatest rock lyricists. I remember, with some fondness, hits such as What A Waste, Rhythm Stick and Clever Trevor.
They’re sung with a vituperative snarl by Dury lookalike John Kelly, who heads up a well-drilled, rough and ready (with the emphasis on rough) tribute band.
One further warning: I’m still trying to get these songs out of my head — they are very persistent earworms.
Time to tune in for a Lyrical mix of music and dance
Opera by Tully Potter
Live From Covent Garden (Royal Opera House)
Rating:
To raise much-needed funds, the Royal Opera House is giving three Saturday online concerts.
This first one, which was highly enjoyable, is available free for another week. The BBC’s Anita Rani presented the evening, and Antonio Pappano introduced the music from the Steinway, played with his customary flair.
We had an unusual viewpoint, looking out into the famous auditorium from upstage. I was grateful to hear soprano Louise Alder in Britten’s song cycle On This Island, to poems by W.H. Auden, demonstrating a neat trill in ‘Let the florid music praise’. Not in prime voice, tenor Toby Spence was unwise to take the first two of Butterworth’s six Shropshire Lad songs so slowly.
Hayward and Corrales share an emotional moment during the production
He was more convincing by the time he reached the eerie ‘Is my team ploughing?’ Choreographer Wayne McGregor offered a world premiere, a pas de deux to Richard Strauss’s Morgen! (Tomorrow!) by Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales: they are a couple, so could intertwine to their hearts’ content.
Hayward spoke John Henry Mackay’s romantic words first, Vasko Vassilev played violin obbligato to Pappano’s piano, and Alder sang affectingly. Cast and crew also ‘took the knee’ in solidarity with Black Lives Matter.
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, a class act, sang songs on pets by Mark-Anthony Turnage — the second unaccompanied — to poems by Stevie Smith, Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman. He followed up with Britten’s 1941 setting of the folksong The Crocodile.
After an interview with Turnage, Finley returned for Gerald Finzi’s version of Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. Opera was represented by Morgana’s Act 1 closing aria from Handel’s Alcina — premiered at Covent Garden in 1735 — coquettishly sung by Alder, and Bizet’s duet from The Pearl Fishers with Spence and Finley.
Tomorrow, when viewers pay £4.99, we will see Mahler’s Song Of The Earth with Sarah Connolly and David Butt Philip, and Vadim Muntagirov dancing to music by Gluck.