Small Island star Leah Harvey says she understands her own family history better thanks to the play.
The actress, from east London, plays Jamaican immigrant Hortense in the National Theatre’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s bestselling novel.
Harvey, whose grandmother came over from St Lucia as part of the Windrush generation, explained the significance of trying on her costume for the first time with fellow star Shiloh Coke.
“We said ‘We’ve just stepped back in time and we’re literally these people’, it makes you realise they were real people,” she said. “I was at my grandmother’s 80th, and she made a speech in such a Hortense fashion that I thought ‘Now I understand her’, it was a beautiful moment. I understood her more from working on the play. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s why she speaks and holds herself in this way’.”
Levy, who was the daughter of Windrush immigrants, died just before rehearsals began, but Harvey said: “You can always feel her presence and we had a picture of her up on the wall in the rehearsal room, and of her mother, so she’s been there.”
