“Appropriate” New Venture Theatre Brighton

Appropriate is none the less subversive for taking the white American family play unit, twisting gothic and brushing the outside of an abandoned Arkansas mansion with ghosts. There’s five generations of plantation family buried nearby. And near the river, slaves. The very title fans out meanings.

Three siblings of the Lafayette family converge on the old family home, to see it sold and sift the jumbled contents. There’s the oldest, Toni, in Sophie Dearlove’s explosive, judgementally bitter divorcee whose son Rhys (Moses Azadeh) convincingly flinches from her control. It’s why he’s chosen to live with his father. Whilst Azadeh glimmers both shame yet redemptive warmth, Dearlove detonates or poisons what tentative scars are forming. Yet beneath this, her Toni wants what everyone’s found their crooked way there for.

There’s Greg Donaldson’s reasonable-seeming Bo, the writer whose magazine he knows secretly is on the skids. Donaldson invests him with a weary yet wired New Yorker liberalism: one  sorely tried by a scent of money under the stink of what they all find. Amelia Leigh is all antennae as his wife Rachael; who later diagnoses her transformation into an unpleasant pushy woman – who nevertheless wants to breed “winners” – as proximity to her toxic in-laws. Daughter Cassidy at least, as Maria Sturt’s appealingly bright-eyed, alert reading suggests, isn’t initially damaged by any of it. Though a book reveals her gleaming in a disturbed light. Brother Ainsley doesn’t quite know what he’s doing (in this performance, a confident Hal Offen). Which leads to revelations.

We first see a break-in. Though the youngest sibling, recovering alcoholic Frank or Franz, in Oliver Canavan’s powerful depiction of that frantic bid for salvation, is convinced they’ve turned a corner. Occasionally it’s true. And his angel is 23-year-old River, Maisie Chalk’s child of lawyers preaching a reiki-rich, rich-free philosophy she tries on Toni with predictable results.

River’s convert though hasn’t told her everything about his past brush with paedophilia. River’s reaction though to Cassidy’s fascinated stare is delicate, non-judgemental but calling everything right. Despite all the anthro-speak, Chalk proves River’s the only morally undamaged, free person on this old slave estate.  There’s other connections too, between Sturt’s emotionally literate 13-year-old Cassidy in her dealings with Rhys. 

Jacobs-Jenkins, like J B Priestley before him in An Inspector Calls, notes the young can face the dark and collective guilt more than you think; and learn far more than their elders.

Directed by Lewis the outstanding set-design of a distrait mansion interior by Michael Folkard is another character. A gone-with-the-winding staircase upstage right overlooks a ghoulishly-preserved, eggshell-green drawing-room scumbled with junk, progressively cleared. From portraits, bookshelves and outfalls, this is the most detailed, ingenious set I’ve encountered Upstairs.

It’s strikingly lit by Ewan Cassidy with slatted light ghosting gloaming in. Candles, candelabra-lamps and (in varying blue-greys) a seasonally-adjusted set of Midwest storms seep through a stage-left window. It’s the most outstanding lighting I remember here, matched only by Strat Mastoris for An Experiment With an Air-Pump in 2024. Another star is Richard Lindfield’s startlingly naturalistic, un-canny sound: deafening cicadas, eerie wrenches, a car-lock and a car off; and Moog Gravett’s fight direction is unnervingly ferocious. Lewis is largely responsible for voice-coaching: pitch-perfect accents throughout .