Appropriate
Donmar Warehouse, London

Hansard
National Theatre, London

The great literary critic, Professor Harold Bloom, coined the phrase “the anxiety of influence” for the agonised relationship of writers – stymied by admiration, fearful of plagiarism – with those who have used similar subjects or structures.

In Appropriate, the American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins shows that one approach is to celebrate an idea’s ancestry. Depicting the Lafayette clan gathering for the sale of an Arkansas plantation owned by a celebrated US judge, Jacobs-Jenkins’ calls his second act “Walpurgisnacht” (Witches’ Sabbath), the name of the equivalent section of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Anecdotes about the late patriarch nod knowingly to James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941) and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). The marital, financial and addictive issues of the Lafayettes might put them in the same rehab and self-help groups as the people in Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County (2007).