August: Osage County

I went back to New York for a brief trip a week or two ago and saw some interesting things. Gypsy with Patti Lupone (not that marvellous if I’m honest, she somewhat mannered, the production v dusty); Richard Goode playing Beethoven with the NY Philharmonic; the extraordinary Courbet exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (which is described more eloquently than I could hope to in the LRB by TJ Clark); and the now Pulitzer Prize winning August: Osage County by Tracy Letts.

August was three hours and twenty minutes long, so with two ten min intervals it was three hour-long acts. After the Triple Bill I felt quite at home. The play is a calculated homage to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey and in some ways to Shepard’s Buried Child. A drug-addled woman in her 60s and her three daughters, plus their various husbands and children, gather at the family home to cope with the recent suicide in murky circumstances of their alcoholic poet/academic father. The comically dysfunctional family’s secrets tumble across the stage to a point which is just this side of Gothic implausibility, and the acting has both a naturalness and yet also a one-size larger than life quality which fits the material perfectly. The long evening shot by, to the point where only for the second time in my life I found myself looking at my watch and thinking “oh no, only 20 more minutes left!” [insert Whingers joke here]. It all feels authentically real yet also reflects something larger about the American experiment. Letts also takes care to ensure there’s a stream of fantastic gags (they’re situational and don’t survive quoting).

Mark Shenton’s piece on the Guardian’s blog set me thinking about it again (and since he flatters me with a reference, this is my hat-tip back). I think his analysis of why there appears to be a directing vacuum which Brits have been filling in New York rings true, though so, too, does one of the comments posted there about Broadway snobbery overlooking the work of US directors from the regions. But the thing about August: Osage County was that it was wonderfully well directed (by Anna D Shapiro) and in a way which I think out of reach to any Brit: I’m not sure I’d want to see a different production of it in London. There’s a sort of character-ful saltiness missing in our productions of American work. (Which is why it will be interesting to see Bill Bryden’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Small Craft Warnings which I hear is happening in London soon: his original production of the well-known gooey-liberal David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross had what I’m talking about in spades). Part of August’s very aesthetic completeness was the sense of it coming organically out of a culture which is frankly alien to us here; the audience there completed it, too. Then again, of course, there must have been plenty of US fans of The History Boys who couldn’t bear the thought of it being done by Americans. (One or two of them reviewed it in Los Angeles…)

Anyway, worth noting for the fact that it was as vital and authentic a piece of American theatre as I’d seen since the premiere of Angels in America and an unusually bright advert for the Pulitzer Prize, not previously an infallible guide to sensitive or insightful drama.