Osage County

This award-winning play brings American family drama at its dysfunctional best to the stage.

Editorial Review

Tracy Letts' August: Osage County steps straight off the boards of Broadway and the West End for a season with the Melbourne Theatre Company, with accolades including Tony, Olivier and New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Breathing life into the American theatre mainstay of the "fractured family" saga, Letts has created a nuanced, insightful and traumatically funny emotional portrayal of the American family unit as a microcosm for a dysfunctional nation.

In the dusty plains north of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a family struggles to come to terms with their father's disappearance and the final collapse of their finely-balanced dynamic. Robyn Nevin, as the unhinged and acerbic matriarch Violet Weston, stumbles, claws and shreds her way through a cast of 13, clinging with desperate aggression to the final vestiges of her power. "If you can't get rid of the family skeleton," George Bernard Shaw advised us, "You may as well make it dance." And Violet is prepared for a hoedown.

Proceedings rapidly descend into a rabid slinging match of family secrets as ancient wounds are reopened with ferocious disdain and old roles are miserably reprised. But ultimately, all are too aware there can be no winner, and the performance takes on a tragic tone of isolation and hopelessness. This is theatre at its bitter, traumatic best.

Photo by Jeff Busby

Brooke Babington (May 29th viewing)

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