We’ve come to expect surprises from the brilliant black American writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who won this newspaper’s Charles Wintour Award for most promising playwright two years ago for the gasp-inducing An Octoroon at Richmond's Orange Tree Theatre. His new work doesn’t disappoint.
Appropriate is a bitterly funny Arkansas family drama with ghostly overtones that raise genuine goosebumps. This is fitting: the three siblings at its heart are haunted both by their family’s fraught recent history and its slave-owning past. Ola Ince’s confident production, by turns eerie and full-throated, features a strong cast led by Monica Dolan at her thwarted, raging best.
The Lafayettes have gathered to dispose of the ancestral plantation house where their father retired and died, its grounds seeded with corpses. Toni (Dolan), recently divorced and mother to troubled teen Rhys, did the family’s emotional heavy-lifting after their mother died; Bo (Steven Mackintosh), who has two young children with his Jewish wife Rachael, paid the bills from New York; Franz (Edward Hogg) is the druggie screw-up and sex criminal who returns after 10 lost years with a young, “spiritual” fiancé called River in tow.
Matters heat up when Bo’s young son discovers a photo album of lynched and possibly mutilated black people. Was the late patriarch a racist? Maybe an anti-Semite too? The book passes through the hands of every character, tainting them as it goes. There’s an underground thrum of unhealthy sexual desire, too.
The play isn’t perfect. There’s a jigsaw neatness to the way each character’s central flaw or fear is relentlessly exposed, and the script dances close to the edge of absurdity sometimes. Dolan is terrific, Mackintosh great, and the younger cast members are impressive, but Hogg’s Franz strikes a hysterical false note.
Mostly, though, this is an audacious, vividly atmospheric tour de force. And it reminds you that apprehension can be as powerful a tool in theatre as wit.
Until 5 October (020 3282 3808, donmarwarehouse.com)
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