Reviews of leftovers – toxic inheritance shows interesting family conflicts | Theater

Bny Ockrent’s dark drama about a grieving family has dramatic colors, even if the absurdity begins slowly. But that’s families and childish: misbehaving and falling into their original roles, childish, especially overactive.

The most difficult situation here is not the recent death of the mother, which has caused the four older brothers to gather at her house and chase the inheritance issues, but the one thing that their grandfather gave them that brings them down.

It is a painting, possibly by the artist Camille Pissarro, but possibly stolen from a Jewish family whose people died in a concentration camp during World War II. The brothers don’t know how it got here but suspect it was played by their grandfather – a veteran war hero who served in Germany.

The new knowledge of the multi-million pound family inheritance provokes bad behavior in all of them: the ruthless Jonny (JJ Field) has already made plans to sell it on the black market while the older and older sister, Liv (Sally Phillips), insists that she will not profit from the Nazi economy (“We are good people”). Younger brothers Michelle (Charly Clive), a primary school teacher accused of acting like a child, and flibbertygibbert Rob (Sam Swainsbury), occupy different roles between the two adults.

Preparation is no different from Branden Jacobs Jenkins’ Appropriatein which a poisoned inheritance is found in the attic after the death of a parent. That play – about race and the history of toxic slavery – packs a lot of punch. Here ethical questions threaten to disrupt Ockrent’s writing.

Directed by Michael Longhurst, it was defeated and stopped at first, playing in Joanna Scotcher’s half-filled living room and public debate over whether or not to keep the paint. These four characters are still unknown and Phillips offers a limited service, some followers, it seems.

But the tone rises to a crescendo in the form of physical comedy, which is both silly and funny, involving everything from their mother’s healing stone (turned into a weapon) to an ancient tree, furiously falling and dragging them into the house.

It’s so superficially resolved – you won’t believe the change in the siblings’ relationship at the end. But even so, the whole thing is violent, silly, and very entertaining, with the anger and ugliness that grief can unleash in families.