MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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Appropriate insight into toxic legacy of slavery
MAYER WAKEFIELD recommends a hard-hitting drama of a family in denial about past collusion in the ‘triangular trade’
PIC CAP: In denial: Franz (Edward Hogg) and Bo (Steven Mackintosh) Pic: Marc Brenner
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production that panders – if inadvertently – to Western prejudice against China
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a history that excavates the enormous role played by agricultural workers in recent times
ALEX HALL recommends a book that places empirical evidence at the heart of understanding racism
Appropriate
Donmar Warehouse, London
THERE’S an agonising irony in the fact that the first London production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate has Barclays Bank — a bank with dark roots in the slave trade — as its principal sponsor.
The US playwright’s 2014 work examines the Lafayette family who are forced to confront the spectre of their own family history in the triangular trade but cannot truly bring themselves to do so.
Siblings Toni, Bo and Franz have returned along with their loved ones — or not, as the case may be — to the decaying plantation house in south Arkansas where they were raised, to divide a property which has been in the family for five generations.
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