Perth Festival saves best until last with Black Swan/Belvoir Street’s stunning take on American classic
August: Osage County ★★★★★
State Theatre Centre, Northbridge until March 16
Plenty of shows at the Heath Ledger get standing ovations, but I’ve never encountered an audience all but leaping to its feet at the halfway point — an explosion of ecstasy at the end of the hilarious, zinger-flying, tension-filled dinner scene that’s the best sequence I’ve seen on a Perth stage in years.
The opening-night crowd at Heath Ledger saved the full force of their appreciation at the end of Black Swan/Belvoir Street’s production of August: Osage County, Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning tragic-comedy set it in a decaying farmhouse on the expansive flatlands of Oklahoma, but once they got to their feet, there was no leaving until the large cast had returned three times.
Caroline Brazier and Hayley McElhinney in August: Osage County.
And they deserved every cheer and clap, because director Eamon Flack and his cast — a mix of East Coast-based performers and locals — had taken us on a gripping three-hour journey into the past, present and uncertain future of a breathtakingly dysfunctional American family whose epic battles are so brutal and bleakly funny they resonate beyond the Great Plains to encapsulate the entire deeply conflicted country.
August: Osage County begins slowly as we are introduced to clapped-out, alcoholic poet Beverly Weston (Geoff Kelso), his pill-popping wife Violet (Pamela Rabe), whose mouth cancer is a symbolic of the bile that spills out each time she opens it, and the young Native American woman (Bee Cruse) Beverly hires as a live-in cook and caregiver for Violet.
When Beverly goes missing, Violet’s sister (Caroline Brazier) and her three daughters — Barbara (Hayley McElhinney), Ivy (Amy Matthews) and Karen (Anna Sampson) — and their partners and families descend on the home, setting the stage for the rip-roaring dinner scene that will have you gagging and gasping.
Even though she is ailing and as high as a kite, Violet effortlessly eviscerates one daughter after the other, reminding them of her and Beverly’s impoverished history growing up on “the Plains” (site of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s) and how little they have made of their lives, a drive to survive at all costs that Flack believes is why the play now speaks to Trump-dominated America.
Violet also takes perverse pleasure in rubbing her daughters’ noses in the failure of their lives, telling the romantically desperate Karen she “is about as sexy as a wet cardboard box”, and the tomboyish singleton Ivy that she needs to put on make-up if she wants to catch a man: “The only woman pretty enough to go without make-up was Elizabeth Taylor — and she wore a ton!”
The cast is uniformly brilliant, with each having their moment in the sun as Letts digs deep into the dysfunction that has passed on from generation to generation and the dark secrets pushing through walls of the falling-apart Weston home, which has none of the solidity you expect of dramas set in old family places. Their world is literally falling apart.
By the end of this epic, big-cast production it boils down to a sizzling two-hander, with the magnificent Rabe giving us a monster matriarch for the ages — she is clownish and cruel and devastatingly insightful (she knows all and is an expert manipulator) — and the stupendous McElhinney turning into a version of her frightening mother. Rabe is great, but McElhinney is her equal all the way in this thrilling slugfest.
It was odd and exhilarating to watch the Westons tear each other apart as the world is reeling from the American president humiliating his house guest, vicious Violet style.
Even though this is a play free of politics, Letts probes the brutalised American psyche, in which the drive to survive and succeed damages souls and spreads the pain from one generation to the next.
I haven’t stopped thinking about Letts’ play and this world-class production, which is for me the absolute highlight of this year’s Perth Festival. Anyone who craves great theatre should not miss it.
August: Osage County is on at the State Theatre Centre until March 16.