Review: The Ultimate Dysfunctional Family Is Presented With Energy And Emotion In New Theatre's Captivating Staging Of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

Friday 15th June 2018, 7:30pm, New Theatre

Louise Fischer's (Director) expression of Tracy Letts's complex insight into family dysfunction, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY is presented with captivating conviction and comedy as trauma is transferred through generations. Capturing the truths the Weston family would rather keep secret, this 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning play presents a view of middle America but it messages are universal.

For those unfamiliar with the work, which premiered in 2007 at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre, the three Act play follows the events that unfold inside the Weston family home during one hot August in Pawhuska Oklahoma after the Patriarch Beverly Weston goes missing. The story centres on Beverly's wife, the cantankerous pill popping Violet (Alice Livingstone) who lives her life in a drug addled stupor interspersed with having a go at anyone around her, particularly her second daughter Ivy (Sonya Kerr) and her sister Mattie Fae Aiken (Emily Weare). When it becomes clear that the acclaimed poet is not returning to the marital home, Ivy's sisters Barbara (Helen Stuart) and Karen (Amy Scott-Smith) are summoned home for the funeral. As with the hostile relationship between Beverly and Violet, as seen before his disappearance, Violet has an equally volatile relationship with her offspring and her sister and putting that many women in one home is a recipe for disaster at the best of times, but these women share a festering resentment and inherited vile behaviour of point scoring and insults leading to explosive consequences. The men that surround these women are also damaged, either by a growing fatigue at dealing with their hostility for decades or their own distractions or deviancies with the only people safe from the daemons are the characters on the periphery, the new housekeeper Johnna (Emilia Stubbs Grigoriou) and the local Sherriff (Brett Heath).

Sallyanne Facer (Costume and Set Design) has devised an inventive method to convey the Weston's three-storey home with the use of raked timber platforms to provide vertical variety whilst splitting up the stage to ensure that it is clear that whilst fireworks are erupting in one room, other family members are never far away. A minimal amount of furniture, selected to show the age and also the modest wealth of the Weston's, is included to convey the purpose of the space without overly cluttering the stage which at times is filled with up to 11 performers. The costuming is kept simple due to the contemporary setting but also expressing enough of each character, from the 65-year-old reclusive Violet in conservative attire to youngest daughter Karen's new-found confidence, and one would suspect, desire to distract her older fiancé from his devious ways by way of a figure hugging dress displaying her curves, and 14-year-old Jean's rebellious grunge getup, desperate to be older and out of her mother's watchful eye.

The performances are outstanding across the board. For the characters born and raised in Oklahoma, the accents are consistently southern with a range of intensity depending on age and implied sobriety, with members who had escaped Pawhuska having a less intense sound when compared to Violet and Mattie Fae. Outsider Steve, Karen's lecherous lover, is presented with a hint of Bronx New York with a hint of Italian thrown by Lynden Jones in as a possible link to the 50-year-old fiancé's somewhat shady business dealings implying a modern mafia to top off his already repulsive character. Brett Heath gives Sherriff Deon an innocence and simplicity whilst ensuring that he is seen as less educated than his college educated high school sweetheart Barbara who he reconnects with once she realises her marriage is over. Peter Flett balances Charlie Aiken's drug induced calm along with a compassion and pacifist nature in contrast to the chaos he has married into to present a gentler voice amongst the screaming and insults before he eventually snaps whilst Emilia Stubbs Grigorious gives Cheyenne Native American Johnna a peacefulness and balance as she serves the often racist and belittling family with calm and an underlying empathy.

Whilst James Bean has little stage time before Beverly disappears, his presentation of the introductory monologue is well paced and realistic as the pickled paternal figure lays the groundwork for an understanding of the madness of the family, from his bizarre relationship with his wife where they have come to an agreement over their vices to his retreat into his literature. Emily Weare ensures that Mattie Fae is seen as a good match for Violet, showing how alike the sisters are in their hostility towards each other and their own children to present a thoroughly unlikable mother, aunt and sister who finds it necessary to belittle everyone, least of all her own son Little Charles which she has a seething resentment for. Little Charles is presented with a protected juvenile innocence with an undertone of perpetual fear by Jake Fryer-Hornsby whilst Kirra Farquharson gives Barbara's only child Jean Fordham a quiet complexity of contradictions.

Helen Stuart, Sonya Kerr and Amy Scott-Smith ensure the sisters each display a damage and underlying resentment from growing up with Violet as a mother which combined with Violet and Mattie Fae's stories implies an intergenerational inherited cycle of trauma that restricts future generations from understanding how to love and interact, having never seen the care and compassion in their own childhoods. Stuart ensures that Barbara displays the same tendencies as her mother with a desire to control everything with a destructive honesty. The seemingly still single Ivy is presented with more of a resignation by Kerr as Ivy has been the only one of her siblings to remain in close contact with their parents, putting up with Violet's insults and verbal abuse but her simmering resentment and desire for freedom is presented with a wonderful display of confidence and courage along with hurt at the revelations that come out. Scott-Smith captures Karen's vulnerability, making it clear that the youngest daughter's method of coping with the psychologically abusive family was to retreat into herself until she sees the opportunity to make her dreams come true, so long as she is prepared to turn a blind eye to the compromises she will have to make to get them.

The stand out of the show is however Alice Livingstone's portrayal of Violet Weston. Livingstone presents the ailing woman's physicality and speech patterns extremely convincingly as the parallels between the cancer consuming her mouth replicates the cancer of words and hate that has infected her family and threatens to leave her alone. She gives the old woman a power and gravity whilst allowing Violet's apparent vulnerability to be exposed, luring the audience in for sympathy then realising that it is part of the old woman's manipulation of emotions whilst having moments which do speak to the truth of her childhood and a justification of her behaviour.

Louise Fischer has delivered another incredible production of a complex and detailed story that covers so many extremely weighty and dark topics from privilege, ambition, narcissism, self-loathing, addiction, loneliness, adultery, abuse and suicide whilst still enabling the humour in the situations to be realised. Powerful and perfectly presented, do not miss this production of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

6 June - 7 July 2018

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