REVIEW: Black Swan State Theatre’s August: Osage County opens at Heath Ledger Theatre for Perth Festival

Perth Festival 2025’s August: Osage Country is as scorching hot as the northern hemisphere summer in which the play takes place. The co-production between Black Swan State Theatre Company and Belvoir Street Theatre has travelled to Heath Ledger Theatre following an award-winning extended season in Sydney at the end of 2024. Australian audiences may not be so familiar with the Native American tribal nations — including the Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Nakota, Dakota, Pawnee and Osage — across the Great Plains from central Canada and across 13 of the United State of America. However, our own history resonates only too well with the brutal displacement and genocide of its First Nations people by European settlement. The demise of the Plains’ ecology began with the slaughter of millions of bison for agriculture and farming, the destruction by settlers a making of their own doing as the land descended into a Dust Bowl. Hardship only grew greater as the years and generations passed. It is this decline of the great American dream that led Oklahoma-born playwright Tracy Letts to pen his 2008 Pulitzer and Tony award-winning play August: Osage County, arguably following in the footsteps of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Written before the rise of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, where he has since been voted to power twice by a country desperately clinging to a former era of prosperity, the play is riddled with characters shaped by disillusion, pain and addiction. Set in small town Pawhuska, Oklahoma, opiate-addicted matriarch Violet Weston’s family, including her three adult daughters, congregate when her alcoholic poet husband Beverly goes missing. Expertly guided by director Eamon Flack, the three-act play is a ticking time bomb of dark secrets, generational trauma, familial tension and revelations. This family in meltdown’s own brutality towards one another is like a car crash you are unable to look away from as you hang on every word, and there are a lot of them across the three-hour, 30-minute duration with two intervals. Dialogue is pelted back and forth by the 13-strong cast, with acting veteran Pamela Rabe in the finest of forms as the monstrous Violet Weston. Her adversarial character’s viperous nature balances between rage, sarcasm and someone desperately popping pills to numb their existence. This Perth season retains part of Sydney’s original casting, such as Rabe and Bert LaBonte as Bill Fordham, along with seven locally cast actors including the ever-brilliant Caroline Brazier as Violet’s sister Mattie Fae Aiken and Hayley McElhinney as Barbara Fordham. McElhinney’s Barbara is awe-inspiring in this highly toxic mother/daughter power struggle, while the rest of this formidably first-rate ensemble never miss a beat in bringing this dysfunctional family to colourful life. The volatile dinner in Act II is edge of your seat viewing, its carefully crafted chaos increasing in velocity and concluding with a palpable intensity that leaves the audience yearning for Act III to begin sooner than the interval will allow. The play pivots between big laughs to even bigger drama as it catapults into the final stretch. Authentic costume design by Ella Butler pays homage to the community of Pawhuska, Oklahoma down to minute detail, while the highly adaptable set design by Bob Cousins embraces the location’s barren existence with its rundown aesthetic. Unflinching, funny and utterly tragic, August: Osage County is a gripping slice of contemporary American drama that is delectable at every bite. 5 stars August: Osage County is at Heath Ledger Theatre until March 16.