MARK TURNER wallows in the virtuosity of Swansea Jazz Festival openers, Simon Spillett and Pete Long

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.

MAYER WAKEFIELD speaks to Urielle Klein-Mekongo about activism, musical inspiration and the black British experience

MAYER WAKEFIELD is swept up by the tale of the south London venue where music forged alliances across race, class and identity

MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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MAYER WAKEFIELD relishes a witty and uplifting rallying cry for unity, which highlights the erasure of queer women