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.

Inevitably, quarrels ensue as the toxic fireball of an elder sister and executor of the estate Toni, played with repulsive accuracy by Monica Dolan, tries her hardest to trigger everyone’s vulnerabilities and excavate their pasts.

When youngest brother Franz (Edward Hogg) makes a bid for forgiveness of his prior misdemeanours and subsequent 10-year absence, Bo (Steven Mackintosh) finds it in himself to understand.

But neither can resist turning inwards to their own longings. Nor can they really face the truth of their elders’ crimes when Bo’s eight-year-old son Ainsley (Orlando Roddy) discovers a photo album of lynchings among his grandfather’s hoard on Fly Davis’s evocative, clutter-strewn set.

Rather than try to delve into the reality of their father’s past they choose to bury the brutality in the fantasy of “a different time.”

Multiple opportunities for true reflection are passed up in favour of self-loathing and slanging matches, one of which verges on the brink of farce with a comical fight sequence to boot. Aside from that, Ola Ince’s piercing direction puts you in the room and helps you to make sense of why these characters choose denial in favour of truth.  

Next month a memorial will be unveiled to mark 100 years since one of the bloodiest spates of mass lynching in the history of the US, which took place in Elaine, Arkansas.

Meanwhile, Jacob-Jenkins leaves you questioning how can we truly break the racial barriers erected in the past without directly confronting them in the present.

Runs until October 5, box office: donmarwarehouse.com.