ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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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’
In denial: Franz (Edward Hogg) and Bo (Steven Mackintosh)
[Marc Brenner]
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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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