‘What is it we want that the white people find it so hard to give?’

Photo: Tobi Bakare, Gilbert Kyem Jnr, Gamba Cole in The Lonely Londoners at Jermyn Street Theatre, photo by Alex Brenner

Daniel Nelson

You can’t get a quart into a pint pot, according to an old saying. But the Jermyn Street Theatre has disproved it twice over.

Firstly, the 70-seat theatre, a minute’s walk from Piccadilly Circus, proves it can whip up a dramatic storm on the tiniest of stages in the smallest of performance places.

Secondly, playwright Roy Williams has re-worked Sam Selvon’s novel, The Lonely Londoners, the first book about Black working-class Londoners, shrinking three years of the characters’ lives to 90 minutes on stage.

It’s a powerhouse production on a stage barely two paces wide that, amazingly, never feels constricted.

If you watched Sir Lenny Henry’s Three Little Birds on ITV last year, you’ll know the territory: the lowering impact of the cold and drabness after Trinidad or Jamaica; the in-your-face racism; the violence; the police corruption; the desperate search for good jobs; sexual desire; strained relationships; the homesickness; the allure of London; the camaraderie. The cigarettes.

There’s love and longing here, contemplation and companionship, as well as prostitution and poverty, but the predominant feeling is the crushing, distorting impact of racism, the bewilderment and anger it causes: “...what is it that we people do in this world that we have to suffer so? What is it we want that the white people and them find it so hard to give? A little work, a little food, a little place to sleep… “

“It’s not we that the people don’t like. Is the colour, black.”

No wonder so many of that generation felt mentally mashed. The “race problem” that white Brits moaned about was not a problem for them, the whites: the problem was faced by the migrants.

These men were heroes, as were the women, though they don’t figure so much in the play (an imbalance redressed in Three Little Birds).

It’s doubly shocking, unforgivable, that after years battling through prejudice, strife and struggle, the Windrush generation were again confronted by Home Office prejudice, strife and struggle.  

Trilbys off to the theatre for staging this intelligent, moving, imaginatively directed and acted slice of migrant life.                     

The Lonely Londoners, £10-£35, Jermyn Street Theatre, 16B Jermyn Street, St. James's, SW1Y 6ST, until 6 April. Info:Jermyn Street