6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Wednesday28 August 2019ARTS
Edward Hogg,
left, and Steven
Mackintosh in
‘Appropriate’Sarah HemmingEver since the Greeks, the family gath-
ering has been prime material for dram-
atists.It’s a form particularly loved by
American playwrights, with the great
family drama in part a testbed for the
state of the nation.
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’Appropriate
makes dazzling use of that fact. A play
about history, legacy and appropriation,
it is in itself a deliberate and mischie-
vous act of appropriation of that whole
“family drama” genre and a test of what
is and isn’t appropriate. It is, again, a
shrewd analysis of the state of the
nation; it’s also a comment on whose
stories get told and how that shapes our
understanding. It’s brilliantly sophisti-
cated, often bitingly funny and it con-
firms Jacobs-Jenkins as one of the sharp-
est young US dramatists writing today.
Here, as so often, there has been a
death, and the scatteredrelatives have
hauled themselves down to the parental
home to dispose of the property.
The place is in a state of spectacular dis-
arrayand the Lafayette family are in
similar disrepair.
Older sister Toni (Monica Dolan, furi-
ous and desolate), seethes with resent-
ment at having to pick up the pieces; Bo
(Steven Mackintosh, bustling and brit-
tle), agitates about money; Franz
(Edward Hogg, damaged and desper-
ate), the dissolute younger son, pitchesup with a new lifestyle, a hippy fiancée
and an apology in his pocket.
Before long they are tearing chunks
out of each otheras the play unfolds
along expected lines. But gradually
Jacobs-Jenkins uses that familiar tem-
plate to broaden the picture and to draw
attention to the unseen, the unspoken
and the unresolved.
The home, which the siblings hope to
get a price for, is a former plantation
house in Arkansas: out in the grounds
there is a slave burial ground full of
unmarked graves. Underpinning the
onstage drama about heritage, focused
on a troubled white family, is the much
bigger legacy of America’s bitter racial
history. The people we don’t see are as
important, if not more so, than those we
do, and their silent story is entwined
with the characters on stage. The space
is haunted.
All this comes into sharp focus when
the family finds a horrific photographalbum of lynched black people among
their dead father’s possessions. Whose
was it? How should they deal with it?
Hide it? Destroy it? Sell it? A story about
ownership and about moving on from
the past takes on new and deeper mean-
ing, as does the word “appropriate”.
The play is not without its flaws: the
sheer volume of argument creates a
sense of battle fatigue in places. But
these are quibbles in what is, essentially,
a brilliantly subtle and revealing piece
of drama. Ola Ince’s fine, taut produc-
tion and excellent cast ride its twists and
turns expertly.
Dolan, Mackintosh and Hogg all
subtly suggest the fragility lurking
behind their characters’ aggression and
there’s great work too from Isabella Pap-
pas and Charles Furness as the bemused
teenage children, who will inherit this
story next.To October 5,donmarwarehouse.comDisarray and disrepair make fine drama
THEATREAppropriate
Donmar Warehouse, London
aaaaeSoldiers allow a resident to pass a barrier on Belfast’s Divis Street— PA Archivewas a presenter of TV shows on film
and film-makers. “I don’t enjoy being
that side of the camera these days, but
I tiptoed back for this subject and
this moment.”
Cousins was four in 1969, a skinny boy
left to navigate childhood between the
Catholic Falls Road and Protestant
Shankill. While the films he directs are
always personally driven, his presenta-
tion here can be raw. Discussing child-
hood memories is difficult enough with-
out them involving gunmen.
Menace then was ever-present.
Although he doesn’t mention it on cam-
era, Cousins’s mother was Catholic and
his father Protestant. A “Romeo and
Juliet family”, he calls it, a lovely phrase
for a fraught reality, mistrusted by both
sides. There were moves in and out of
Belfast, exiles to towns such as Bally-
mena, the coastal nook of Ardglass.
“My parents wanted to stay ahead of
what might happen,” Cousins says.
“The whisky breath of the violence on
our necks.”Cousins speaks now of being lucky,
because none of his immediate family
were killed — only their friends. The leg-
acy of such dread does not easily dis-
solve. “I have a reasonably high level of
anxiety all these decades later. The
memories don’t disappear. They just
settle into your subconscious.”
Which is where films land too. Cous-
ins puts some of his passion for cinema
down to factors that might have shaped
it anywhere — a working-class boyhood,
a natural pull towards the visual. His
and Martin’s film is rich with the kind of
insights honed on projects such asThe
Story of Film, the 15-hour voyage
through movie history he released in- Now among others, Cousins
unwraps the elegiac noirOdd Man Out,
with James Mason as a fugitive IRA man
in a snowy Belfast; the Hollywood inan-
ity ofA Prayer for The Dying, as confused
as star Micky Rourke’s accent; he lauds
Elephant, director Alan Clarke’s stark
account of sectarian killings.
But his cinephilia was, he says, also
down to Northern Ireland — to the need
for refuge. “If you’ve had fear in your
life, film allows you to process that. Cin-
ema is a place to be scared in safety.” Yet
an awful irony follows — the sadness of
cinemas in war zones. We see archive
footage of crowds filling the Ritz, a
grand Art Deco 2,200-seater in the
T
he voice of Mark Cousins —
lyrical, gentle — cracks as
he speaks. “I’m sorry, I
struggle to talk about this,”
he says. The subject is
Northern Ireland, specifically the future
of the Good Friday Agreement in a
no-deal Brexit. “It takes our breath
away that the politicians responsible
could jeopardise that, knowing how
many lives have been saved by it. Or
maybe I’m being naive. Maybe we’re
just collateral damage.”
The film-maker and sometime critic
is in his adopted hometown of Edin-
burgh, but still uses “we” to describe his
Northern Irishness. The aim is to dis-
cuss50 Years of the Troubles: A Journey
Through Film, a television documentary
of which he is writer and presenter. It
was intended to mark the anniversary
of the deployment of British troops to
the province in 1969 and the years of
violence that followed. The time lag of
production is such that it will broadcast
amid the potential return of a hard
border with the Republic, the GFA at
risk of being undone.Peace is fraying. Journalist Lyra
McKee was murdered this April in Lon-
donderry; last week, a bomb exploded
in the County Fermanagh borderlands.
The timing is bleak. “When we started
this documentary,” Cousins says, “we
had no idea it would go out with Britain
on the verge of rewinding the clock.”
Here the “we” is Cousins and director
Brian Henry Martin. The maker of sin-
gular, inquisitive documentaries about
cinema, life and points between, Cous-
ins has walked similar ground before —
his 2015 projectI Am Belfastwas a bitter-
sweet hymn to the city in which he was
born and spent much of his childhood.
But that film came out in the spring
before the EU referendum, a time whose
relative calm now feels very distant, and
in few places more than Northern Ire-
land. As a result, Cousins says, the new
documentary has a journalistic mission
its predecessor did not.
Different too is that Cousins is not
behind the camera but in front of it. The
change of role is the first flashback in a
film built around them. In an earlier
professional life during the 1990s, he‘A lot of people
don’t remember
what conflict is’
centre of Belfast. In 1977, it was fire-
bombed. Cinemas closed throughout
the Troubles, culture withered by vio-
lence. Cousins left Northern Ireland at- But it never left him. In a career
defined by a fierce internationalism, he
was drawn to other places of conflict —
staging a film festival in Sarajevo during
the siege, making movies with children
in Kurdish-Iraqi villages.
“I used to wonder if it was a kind of
masochism. But I like to find a more
positive interpretation, because what
you find in these places is recovery.”
Another geographical thread runs
through his documentary — that
between Belfast and America. At home,
the Cousinses listened to Elvis. For all
Mark Cousins’s new documentary chronicles Northern Ireland’s
Troubles through film and cinema. He talks to Danny Leigh
the trauma that surrounded the family,
Cousins only ever saw his father cry
once, watching It’s a Wonderful Life. In
2019, America is again key to the story —
the excitement of Brexit supporters
about a US trade deal cooled by Nancy
Pelosi’s insistence that Congress would
never support one reached through
imperilling peace in Northern Ireland.
“American politicians have under-
stood the complexity of Northern Ire-
land far better than recent British politi-
cians,” Cousins says. “Now there may be
cynicism involved, a pursuit of the Irish-
American vote, but frankly we don’t
care. Bill Clinton spoke about Northern
Ireland with nuance and knowledge
ahead of the Good Friday Agreement,
and that was crucial.”
In Cousins and Martin’s film, the sign-
ing of the GFA in April 1998 is a glorious
twist in the tale, the beginning of the end
of a nightmare. As the current crisis
loomed, Cousins re-read the actual doc-
ument. “It’s at once a boringly written
slab of prose and a masterpiece of politi-
cal reason. It stands as a more successfulpiece of diplomacy than the Treaty of
Versailles or the Dayton Accords
because it held. The violence dwindled.”
The future was always a work in
progress. On screen, Cousins rages at
the grimly named “peace walls”,
the looming iron fences between com-
munities that still scar Belfast. But slow
as renewal can be, he insists it was
only possible at all because of Good Fri-
day. “The idea the agreement itself
would be seen as contentious has
shocked me. It can only be that the
Eton-centric worldview is so removed
from Northern Ireland.”
Typically, you would expect an opti-
mist like Cousins to take pleasure in the
youthful demographics of a country
where 40 per cent of the population are
under 25. He cannot.
“It means a lot of people who don’t
remember how bad the bad times were.
Who don’t know what conflict really is.
Combine that with the fact they are still
very segregated and that would make
the situation dangerous even if West-
minster politicians understood North-
ern Ireland.”
When I ask him to tell me about
the mood there now, his answer is
immediate. “We’re scared.”‘50 Years of the Troubles: A Journey
Through Film’ is on Channel 4 on
September 1 at 10.20pmBritish soldiers
investigate a
burning
building in
Belfast, 1972
Polaris/Eyevine‘American politicians
have understood the
complexity of Northern
Ireland far better than
recent British politicians’
Belfast boy:
film-maker
Mark Cousins.
Left: President
Bill Clinton
visits Belfast’s
Shankill Road
in 1995
Adam Butler/PA
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