Appropriate: Donmar Warehouse

Appropriate is a new play by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed at the Donmar Warehouse by Ola Ince. The three central characters Toni, Bo and Franz meet in their deceased father’s plantation house to sort out his estate. Their tangled personal and family history, revealed in a long series of mostly explosive dialogues, takes in an impressive range of themes: most prominently, the parent/child relationship and racism.

Here I’ll concentrate on Toni. Pathologically unable to accept help from anyone, but appointed as sole executor the estate, we meet her in the first act surrounded by the accumulated detritus of 20 years of her father’s hoarding. Exhausted by caring for her father through a long illness, unaided by her younger brothers, and dealing with the fallout of her son Reese’s brief career as an utterly unsuccesful drug-dealer, her engrained negativity is excusable. Monica Dolan’s superb performance is nuanced and brings out her capacity for love, and her need for it. She is however hard to like: hard for the audience, and impossible for her family members. The moment when she snaps is the climax of the play.

The reviews I read before hand suggested that the shocking photographs of lynchings, found part-way through the first act in the house junk, would dominate the play. While important, and central to the impressively developed racism theme, it is only one of many elements. When it turns out the photos are highly valuable (unlike the house, which, blighted by a graveyard, is worthless), we quickly see that none of the Lafayette children would hesitate to sell them. The moment when they reflexively reach for the polite formulations of the auction house and ‘private dealer’ are most revealing. Of them all, Toni is the most eager to excuse her father’s racism, which emerges very clearly by the end of the play. She is also obliged to confront her own attitudes in several clever set pieces. The most impressive however concerns her youngest brother Franz, a diligent 12-stepper, and his fiancé River, firmly committed to helping him on his journal with whatever resources her relentless spirituality (neatly shading into meaningless psychobabble) can provide. When Bo’s wife Rachel wrongly assumes she is a native American, rather than a New Yorker né Tracy, there is a brilliant moment where we see both characters expose their darkest and most instinctive reactions.

The first act of the play, while highly entertaining, did at times reduce to a sequence of monologues-as-conversation, all delivered at a surprising volume for normal conversation. The febrile atmosphere was convincing, but maybe less oppressive than the director intended. Still, it functioned very effective scene-setting prologue to the longer second act. I’m not sure if it was the actors settling down, or a deliberate directorial decision, but anyway, the vocal and dramatic range vastly improved between the acts. The many witty touches continued in the second act, which was as good a piece of theatre as I’ve seen in recent years.

The play seems to deliberately avoid tying up its loose ends. I suspect the lack of any obvious character development, except perhaps in two of the teenage children, is also deliberate. At the end, we are left with the characters, all ruthlessly exposed, heading back to their normal lives. And instead of any resolution, we are left to think about them, their problems, and the themes their two days in Arkansas have so richly exposed. Overall, a remarkable play, that leaves one with much to chew on.