August: Osage County

The Native American reservation has long gone – along with the mighty bison which once roamed the  Great Plains -  but Osage County in Oklahoma still bears the scars of its environmental and cultural destruction, turning into a dustbowl during the excruciating  heat of August.

Beverly (John Howard), a once celebrated poet, now a fulltime drunk, describes that void before he disappears into it, perhaps from suicide.  His opioid-addicted and vile-mouthed wife, Violet (Pamela Rabe), is left alone in this dilapidated prairie house until her three daughters with their spouses and two children reluctantly arrive to show some interest in planning for her future.

These are finely written characters, with their own, often marital, problems, secrets and desperate dissembling. Climaxing during the funerial dinner, all their truths are gradually revealed as the playwright, without obvious repetition, strips the BandAids off their scabs, with the gleeful help of Violet.  Appropriately, she has mouth cancer. 

August: Osage County is a compelling, lengthy drama about a hugely dysfunctional family and, in the theatrical tradition of dark family interactions, is also bursting with hilarious comedy.  Director Eamon Flack does not always get this balance perfectly, leaning too easily into the play’s melodrama, but his top drawer cast are masters of authenticity. Some at times are under-projected vocally and especially across the production’s open staging. But what a cast of Gothic characters it is:  

The oldest daughter Barbara (Tamsin Carroll) is an academic and control freak mourning her crumbling marriage to Bill (Bert LaBonte), who’s bedding a girl little older than his daughter, who’s also there:  Jean (Esther Williams), a teenage pot-smoker and trouble-chaser.  Violet’s second, daughter, Ivy (Amy Mathews), has hopeless plans to escape her viciousness and find love in New York, while the third, Karen (Anna Samson), is paranoid and madly delusional that her new sleaze-bag fiancée (Rohan Nicol) will be Mr Perfect.  

Aping the habits of their violent mother, Violet’s own sister is there, Mattie (Helen Thomson), bullying her amiable husband, Charlie (Greg Stone), and her understandably introverted son, Young Charles (Will O’Mahony).  Johnny Nasser is the Sheriff arriving with bad news but keen to make it again with old flame Barbara.  Bee Cruse plays Johanna, a native American girl recruited to care for Violet, a quiet presence throughout the play and flashpoint for racism only matched by the misogyny and cruelty.

Letts doesn’t fully develop his theme of how the white man has destroyed the land and all upon it, and left an emptiness in the contemporary American character. It’s simply upstaged by explosive family revelations with plates hurled and secrets confronted, and laughter.

Each characterisation is well-expressed in Ella Butler’s costuming and set designer Bob Cousins, while for Belvoir understandably avoids the naturalism of Letts’ stipulated three storey house, leaves us with fragmented walls and entrances with all scenes performed across the same central space. Luckily, led by the remarkable Pamela Rabe, this is a special ensemble which can fill the void.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman