Theatre: Appropriate
Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (020-3282 3808). Until 5 October Running time: 2hrs 30mins
“There’s nothing like an American play for a good old family barney,” says Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph. Many of the US playwriting greats – Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard and, most recently, Tracy Letts (of August: Osage
County fame) – have mined the family-at-war theme to great effect. Now the great young hope of American theatre, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, an African-American playwright still in his early 30s, gives these (white) forebears a “run for their money with this lacerating portrait” of the white Lafayette clan, who gather at their dead father’s Arkansas plantation house the night before it is sold off in order, it turns out, to “rip bleeding shreds out of one another”.
In a previous acclaimed work, An Octoroon, Branden-Jacobs deconstructed a 19th century Boucicault melodrama to explore the lasting potency of racist tropes, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. In this play he consciously “appropriates” the classic (white) American family drama with results that are “both gravely serious and mordantly funny”. Even by the standards of theatrical clans, this is a dysfunctional bunch. Toni, the eldest, is embittered, and foul-tongued. Middle-child Bo is brazenly avaricious. The youngest, Frank, is a reformed addict with paedophile tendencies. What’s “exhilarating” is that Jacobs-Jenkins “pushes everything to the limits”. There’s not just verbal wrangling, but “crude violence”. He also borrows from the Gothic thriller to suggest the house is haunted by its association with slavery.
At one point someone finds an old photo album containing pictures of dead black people, apparently post-lynching, said Ann Treneman in The Times. Had their father owned this? Was he a murderous racist? And could the pictures be worth anything? It’s a key moment in this viciously funny and “bracingly clever play”, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage, tautly directed by Ola Ince and with top-notch performances. Monica Dolan is “extraordinary” as Toni and Steven Mackintosh “similarly captures the boiling emotions behind Bo’s urbane surface” – all twitches and tightness and nervous breathing. It’s a “magnificent” achievement.