Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a subversive writer. In An Octoroon, based on a 19th-century Dion Boucicault melodrama, he questioned what it meant to be dubbed “a black playwright”. In this play, also dating from 2014, he appropriates the classic American family drama with results that are both gravely serious and mordantly funny.
The focus is on the Lafayette clan who have gathered at their late father’s crumbling old plantation home in Arkansas to sort out their inheritance. Even by the standards of theatrical families, they are notably dysfunctional. Toni, the eldest, is embittered, rancorous and foul-tongued. The middle child, Bo, shows an insatiable appetite for money. Frank, the youngest, is a reformed addict with paedophile tendencies. But the arguments about property are superseded by the discovery of a photo album suggesting that their father, a supposedly liberal lawyer, was a closet racist obsessed with pictures of dead black people.
What is exhilarating about the play is that Jacobs-Jenkins pushes everything to the limits. Not only do the family, ironically named after an aristocratic revolutionary, resort to crude violence; the play also uses the techniques of the gothic thriller to suggest the house is haunted by memories of its association with enslavement. At the same time, Jacobs-Jenkins writes with sly wit: questioning whether their father was involved with the Ku Klux Klan, one of his offspring remarks: “I don’t think he was social enough for this sort of thing.”
Ola Ince’s production faithfully captures the play’s mix of sibling rivalry and ghost story, and Fly Davis’s design suggests, in a manner reminiscent of Blithe Spirit, that even the furniture is spooked. Monica Dolan gives a standout performance as Toni, showing that behind the character’s abrasiveness and cruelty lurks a deep longing for familial love. Steven Mackintosh as the acquisitive Bo, Edward Hogg as the manic Frank and Tafline Steen as his hippie fiancee lend strong support, and the play confirms Jacob-Jenkins’ rare gift for wresting new meanings from stock theatrical forms.
• At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 5 October.
