Theatre review: Appropriate

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been an up-and-coming name in American playwriting in the last couple of years – I personally liked An Octoroon, if not as much as everyone else seemed to, while being less convinced by Gloria, but it was hard to deny the obvious potential. For my money this is the one where that potential is realised (albeit in a play written five years ago,) as the Donmar Warehouse stages the UK premiere of Appropriate. On the surface this is the playwright’s most conventional play to date, being his take on That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional. Six months after the death of their reclusive father, the Lafayette siblings and their families go to his plantation house in Arkansas; he was a hoarder who left half a million dollars in debt, so they have a lot of work to do clearing the place up so that his belongings can be sold in an estate sale, and the house and land sold at auction.

Toni (Future Dame Monica Dolan) is expecting middle brother Bo (Steven Mackintosh) to turn up, but she’s shocked to also find youngest brother Franz (Edward Hogg) letting himself in through a window, given they haven’t heard from him in ten years following his problems with drug and alcohol addiction, as well as a crime that’s harder to forgive.

Fly Davis’ design piles junk onto the stage for the characters to sift through, and somewhere in there is the item that turns the story in a new direction: The family have dealt with (or at the very least brushed under the carpet) the fact that their former wealth was built on slavery, but a disturbing photo album is the first in a series of increasingly grisly discoveries that sheds light on the way prejudice remained very much part of their father’s life as well – something that doesn’t come as much of a surprise to Bo’s Jewish wife Rachael (Jaimi Barbakoff.) Appropriate, like the many plays it riffs off, deals with the way festering issues and resentments in the family come to a head when they’re forced together like this, while also presenting a new perspective on the skeletons in their cupboards: Jacobs-Jenkins says he was inspired to write the play because of the very different critical approach towards such stories depending on whether their subjects were white or people of colour, and set out specifically to tell a white family’s story while downplaying the fact that it comes from a black writer.

But one obvious unique selling point about this is that he gets away with things a white playwright never could: There’s a lot of drama here and the crucial moments all hit home, but what really makes the play memorable is that at heart it’s the darkest of comedies. It’s structured like one, with the action built around setpieces, with one scene of cringe comedy in particular – Franz walking in on his nephew Rhys (Charles Furness) wanking, and the two of them having an excruciatingly awkward conversation avoiding the subject afterwards – a classic setpiece given a jaw-droppingly dark twist by Franz mistakenly thinking Rhys was looking at the infamous photo album.

Meanwhile the suggestion of an underlying ghost story – which Anna Watson’s lighting and Donato Wharton’s sound design amplify with some creepy scene transitions – all builds up to a moment that’ll be hard to beat as this year’s best visual punchline. But my favourite thing about Ola Ince’s production might be something much smaller, in the little, passive-aggressive, accusatory gestures people make that take the subtext of what they’re saying and make it very much text. The cast is rounded out by Tafline Steen as Franz’ fiancée River – set up as the hippy-dippy target of mockery but soon seeming like the only sane person in the room - and Isabella Pappas and Orlando Roddy or Oliver Savell as Bo and Rachael’s children. The ensemble is generally excellent but as ever Dolan is the standout as the unfailingly toxic Toni. Appropriate manages, with seeming ease, to navigate some extremely uncomfortable subjects while remaining consistently entertaining.

Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is booking until the 5th of October at the Donmar Warehouse.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.