In 1988, New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid wrote a letter to her editor, William Shawn, to explain ‘where I came from’ – Antigua, a Caribbean island colonised by the British, who imported African slaves. It was published as a short book which was, she recalls in a new preface, regarded as ‘angry and unpleasant and untrue’.
This new stage version, adapted by director Anna Himali Howard and Season Butler, is angry. It is unpleasant. But it also feels painfully, brutally true. It’s astonishing how little art in the UK demands that we really face the legacy of empire, but Kincaid is completely uncompromising in laying out how colonialism has irreparably damaged her home country, and how impossible it is for her to ‘get beyond’ it.
Two actresses – Cherrelle Skeete and Nicola Alexis – speak her words as they move around the audience, who are sat on benches facing different directions. ‘A Small Place’ begins by addressing the tourist: ‘as your plane descends to land, you might say: “What a beautiful island Antigua is.”’ The tone is knowing, skewering the tourist’s fetishising of Antiguan’s ‘simple’ way of life. ‘A tourist is an ugly human being,’ we’re told, and the imbalance of power revealed inevitably recalls the master/slave, coloniser/native dynamic.
All this is delivered by both actresses with disingenuous, mocking geniality which is – intentionally – extremely uncomfortable to sit with. As the perspective flips from the imagined ignorant outsider to Kincaid’s insider view, with knowledge of the island’s past and more recent troubled history, the tone grows increasingly bitter and accusatory. It is uncomfortable in a different way.
Skeete begins as if reading from the book, and reading is a theme throughout: Antigua’s beautiful library, damaged by a hurricane in 1974 and still not repaired more than a decade later, becomes a symbol for the endemic corruption of the Antiguan government and lack of opportunities for its people.
The actors throw English books to the floors in rage – Jeremy Clarkson thudded at my feet – and Camilla Clarke’s set is like a half-finished library, with metal book trolleys and ‘silence please’ signs. Although that’s not quite right: there are also TVs showing ‘The Beauty and the Beast’, a Christmas tree, a raised desk with a MacBook and microphone. As anger mounts, a printer spews paper, fans whirr, ceiling lights flicker red. An old-fashioned OHP is also used – or rather, not really used, Skeete projecting nothing except a square of light to illustrate Kincaid’s descriptions of Antigua.
The design is surely deliberately ugly and mundane, denying us the romantic beauty of the island. But Himali Howard’s staging itself doesn’t feel terribly illuminating: its gestures aren’t clear or confident enough to really bring Kincaid’s text to theatrical life. The actors walking around the audience allows for directness, but it can also feel fussy and less potent than when they are holding us all together in their gaze.
‘A Small Place’ explored what was – in 1988 – Antigua’s political predicament. Of course, that now makes it a period piece. I wished it could have somehow been brought up to date. The reminder of this chapter of the UK’s history still feels urgent, though, and the skewering of the blinkered tourist mindset still wince-inducing. Even if this production sometimes diffuses rather than intensifies Kincaid’s writing, there’s no denying the power of it.