Fine portrait of a family at war
Claire Allfree goes to see ‘Appropriate’ at the Donmar, in which a dysfunctional American clan faces hard truths
There’s nothing like an American play for a good old family barney. It’s a running thread through the work of Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee and most recently Tracy Letts, whose excoriating reunion comedy August: Osage Country, premiered at the National in 2008. But Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, still only in his early thirties, gives his theatrical forebears a run for their money with this lacerating portrait of the Lafayette clan who gather at their deceased father’s mansion on an Arkansas former plantation to, it turns out, rip bleeding shreds out of one another the night before it is due to be sold.
Some of the finest political dramas in recent years have challenged the assumptions and values of the white middle classes. Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck, recently at the Almeida, had fun with the hand-wringing despair of a bunch of New York liberals unable to comprehend what their country had become under Trump, while this week Robert Icke’s The Doctor at the same north London venue brilliantly told the story of a white Jewish doctor under fire for alleged cultural insensitivity.
Jacobs-Jenkins, who is black, has already proved himself a master chronicler of racial politics – his An Octoroon extravagantly deconstructed a 19th-century melodrama by Boucicault to show how the legacy of slavery lives on in present-day America. He does something similar here. That classic set-up of the big family gathering is deployed to examine how white America is still in denial about the role of its fathers in past brutalities.
Ola Ince’s spookily tense production opens on a junk-filled stage partly shrouded in dust sheets. There is the sense that something awful is lurking. Yet the play’s energy comes less from what happens than from what is said – or rather, screamed. Headed by big sister Toni and brothers Bo and Frank (the latter
has been Awol for 10 years, battling drugs and alcohol), the Lafayettes are the sort of people who love nothing more than airing personal grievances in vicious games of one-upmanship.
Monica Dolan, exuding marvellous dishevelled toxicity as newly single mum Toni, locks horns with Bo (played superbly by Steven Mackintosh) over who invested the most in their father’s care, and has the play’s most incendiary lines, “playfully” calling Bo’s Jewish, primly outraged wife Rachel a “kike” after Rachel accuses her late fatherin-law of being an anti-Semite and, even less playfully, dismissing Frank’s new-age, much younger girlfriend River as a “rape fantasy”. Frank is a jittery mess who thinks he can absolve his sins by delivering a long-overdue apology to his siblings, while Bo is privately struggling with money.
What defines them, however, is their response to the discovery among their father’s possessions of a photograph album depicting lynched African Americans. Like some sort of parlour game, the book passes to each of them in turn, causing brutal truths about them all to emerge.
For example, Bo thinks the photos are worth a fortune and should be sold. Rachel is concerned with the damage that seeing them might inflict upon her children. Toni initially refuses to accept that they are proof that her beloved father might have been a racist.
The house delivers its own restless response. Windows bang. Lights flicker. The cicadas – whose humming, Cassidy points out, is a mating call and signal of impending death in one – continue their oppressive song.
Jacobs-Jenkins both pays homage to the traditio tradition of great American family drama and upends it by suggesting that his charact characters somehow manage to live entirely in isolation from their country’s (and arguab arguably their family) history. Yes, they dutifu dutifully acknowledge how awful the photos are, but no one seems at all perturbed by the fact there is a slave cemetery close c to the house.
One part particular moment of comic horror seem seems to provide irrefutable proof of their th father’s guilt. Yet still, the defence continues, as though for the Lafayettes to accept who their father was is to accept who they are, too. Because ultima ultimately, it is who you are that matte matters. And in the case of the Lafay Lafayettes, it ain’t pretty.