“This wonderful book has been a firm favourite of mine since its publication, and I’m still pinching myself to believe I’ve been permitted anywhere near it as a playwright!” Tim Whitnall said: “It’s been both a privilege and a delight to have distilled Bill Bryson’s hilarious and affecting 379-page travelogue into a two-act stage play. With signature invention and imagination, the production will embrace the full breadth and playfulness of Bryson’s life-affirming travelogue in The Watermill’s fittingly intimate, quintessentially rural space. Notes from a Small Island spent three years in the Sunday Times bestsellers list, sold over two million copies and was voted on World Book Day by BBC Radio 4 listeners as the book that best represents our British identity. Why does the nation that produced Marmite, Gardener’s Question Time and people who say “Ooh lovely” at the sight of a cup of tea, hold such a special place in this American’s heart?

What makes us love this country we call our own?įrom Calais to Scotland, Bill travels the length and breadth of Britain.

Notes from the small island