Audiences Have A Chance to See a 21st Century Masterpiece In ‘August: Osage County’
Image: Photo: Belvoir Street Theatre/Brett Boardman
With its new production of August: Osage County, Belvoir Street Theatre is staging one of the most ambitious and challenging works in the modern theatrical canon.
Pulitzer Prize-winning play hits Sydney stage
This complex, emotional and verbally dense work by American writer Tracy Letts is also not without its rewards: when done properly.
Set in a family house in Oklahoma, the action takes place over several weeks and follows the twilights of its 13 protagonists as the drama plays out.
Sharing equal billing with the cast is the three-story home, which is redolent with fading grandeur and becomes an other-worldly character in its own right.
In the background as an almost unheralded sub-text is the demise of the American Indian tribe that has given their name to the area; the Osage.
What is brought into the present is the fracturing of the American family due to the all too familiar reasons of drug addiction, mental health, suicide, betrayal and the failure of the American Dream.
The August in the title refers to the month, often the hottest of the year in this part of the world.
At the play’s centre is the ageing and drunken poet Beverly Weston (John Howard) and his cancer-ridden and venomous wife Violet (Pamela Rabe), who employs a local American Indian girl Johnna (Bree Cruse) to make life easier for them.
Beverly’s suicide in the first act triggers the events that will unfold by introducing family members, including 14-year-old Jean (Esther Williams), their husbands and the local cop, as they come together for the funeral dinner, all under the pill-addled gaze of the matriarch Violet.
One by one the family members leave either willingly or unwillingly, taking with them their unresolved problems, until we are left with an almost comatose Violet, alone and without redemption.
August Osage County: brilliant performances and filled with laughs
The ensuing two acts after Beverly’s suicide are a master class in writing, and in this case, mostly played out with brilliant performances and a lot of comedy, with the one criticism being the lack of vocal projection of some of the minor characters and the occasional slip in accent.
Under Eamon Flack’s direction this lengthy production wizzes by as he squeezes every opportunity for physicality and laughs while never loosing sight that this is a tragicomedy of an epic scale.
Watching Violet’s character unravel is an exercise in command of presence for Rabe, as is the physical and sensual physical and mental dysfunction of Anna Samson’s Karen Weston.
Rabe considerable comedic chops never falters in her role and keeps it from slipping into bathos.
At the heart of the play is John Howard’s Beverly, the one character for whom there is some sympathy.
Howard’s presence hangs over the production, even though he is physically absent for two of the acts.
View this post on Instagram
Helen Thomson is nothing short of magnificent as Mattie Fae Aiken, as is Tamsin Carrol as Barbara Fordham.
Willian O’Mahony plays the bumbling Little Charlie with just the right amount of gormless charm while Greg Stone as Mattie Fae’s husband Charlie who has a singular voice of reason.
Also in the cast are Johnny Nasser, Robyn Neal, Amy Mathews , Bert Labonte and Rohan Nicole.
Credit must also go to set designer Bob Cousins, who has ingenious adapted the design of the three-story house for the Belvoir stage, while costume designer Ella Butler has given the cast the right well-worn look.
With this version of Osage, audiences are getting chance to see a 21st century masterpiece of writing with great performances that may not happen again for many years.
August: Osage County is an ambitious work with a huge emotional arc that has only seen two productions before in Australia, with the first being the Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2009 season with Robyn Nevin, while in 2018, New Theatre presented a production under the direction of Louise Fischer.
It was also famously a 2013 film featuring Meryl Streep as Violet, with co-stars including Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis and Benedict Cumberbatch.
View this post on Instagram
August: Osage County is on from now till 15 December at Belvoir Theatre in Surry Hills. You can find more information here
You May Also Like
Leave a Reply