To misquote Tolstoy, all happy families are alike and all unhappy families sooner or later end up on the stage. From the house of Atreus to Jez Butterworth’s latest work, The Hills of California, presently on Broadway, familial dysfunction has been dissected and one could almost say celebrated innumerable times. Recent examples are usually built around a special occasion – a dying patriarch, a funeral, a wedding, Thanksgiving or Christmas – at which the mismatched relatives, steaming with long-held resentments for parents, siblings, children, or the odd second cousin, finally let loose in the third act. The standard scène à faire is a meal which is either partaken in strained silence (the only sound a ticking clock) or in a cacophony of angry voices and smashed crockery.

Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is of the damaged dinnerware kind. Beverly Weston, academic, alcoholic and one-time poet, whose lone, much-lauded volume has been mouldering away in remainder bins for decades, has vanished. His disappearance has caused his three daughters, Barbara, Karen, and Ivy, and his raucous sister-in-law, Mattie Fae Aiken, along with their attachments, to descend on the family home ostensibly to support his wife, Violet, a pill-popping virago. Barbara comes with her soon-to-be separated husband, Bill, and their nubile fourteen-year-old daughter, Jean. Karen arrives with her latest romantic disaster, the sleazy Steve. Mattie Fae storms in with her husband Charlie, followed by their ineffectual son Little Charlie. Ivy is single but has plans to remedy that soon. Greetings and commiserations have hardly been uttered before barbs and recriminations are flying in all directions, happily stirred up by Violet, whose barbiturate haze never prevents her from expertly inserting the dagger and giving it a twist.

What raises Letts’s play above the ordinary and has kept it in circulation since its Chicago première in 2007 is his sharp, amusing dialogue and the fact that he has created three-dimensional characters of the type into which actors love to burrow. Underneath the biting humour is a sense of compassion for, and understanding of, these people. Although some roles are showier than others, this is an ensemble piece, and Belvoir has put together an ensemble that more than does it justice.

The set described in the script is a three-story house through which the characters wander. Obviously this is an impossibility on the Belvoir stage, but Eamon Flack’s lean, stripped-down, fluid production is no compromise. By having Beverly (luxury casting in the form of John Howard) haunt the first section of the play, Flack immediately breaks down the strictures of naturalism and allows for scenes to blend into each other. Bob Cousin’s spare set has plenty of apertures through which the cast scamper at times with almost farcical alacrity.

Bee Cruse as Johnna, John Howard as Beverly and Pamela Rabe as Violet (photograph by Brett Boardman)

At the heart of the piece, Pamela Rabe resists the temptation to turn Violet into a boilerplate monster. Rabe highlights her vulnerability and shows that fear is as much of a driving force for her as anger. She is appallingly hilarious as she rips into the assembly at the inevitable funeral feast. At the play’s conclusion, her defiant claim, ‘Nobody is stronger than me’, is the desperate, self-deluding cry of an irredeemably damaged soul. This is Rabe at her formidable best.

As her main antagonist, Tamsin Carroll’s Barbara is a basically decent woman completely at the end of her tether. Already dealing with a deserting husband and an obstreperous teenager, she tries to create order as everything crumbles around her. She is very funny in her attempts to control the conversation during a fish dinner, but also touching when she recoils in fear from the tentative advances of an old admirer.

Helen Thomson lets loose as Mattie Fae. Loud and brassy, but seemingly not self-aware, she makes no attempt to hide her disdain for her husband or her withering contempt for her son. She is bewildered when husband Charlie – a quietly dominant Greg Stone, whose halting, interminable saying of grace at the funeral dinner is a highlight of the show – finally erupts.

The other two Weston sisters have their moments. Anna Samson, despite having an accent that occasionally crosses the state line into Texas, is a frenetically upbeat Karen. She pitches her long introductory speech with the manic ebullience of someone who is attempting to convince herself of her happiness as much as she is the exasperated Barbara. As an unsavoury incident forces her and Steve to leave, she is still trying to remain positive.

Ivy is the victim of a late, melodramatic, and somewhat unconvincing plot twist. Although somewhat taken for granted by the others, Amy Matthews shows Ivy to be as formidable as her sisters and her final remark to Violet and Barbara, when Barbara attempts to pass the blame to Violet – ‘There’s no difference’ – hits hard.

Watching the Weston and Aiken families tear themselves and one another apart in a frenzy of anger, resentment, bad faith, and malice, as Flack avers in his program notes, the audience might wonder if Letts’s work has become the ultimate state-of-the-nation play, given what the American public has just chosen for itself for the next four years – whether Letts intended this or not.

August: Osage County continues at the Belvoir Theatre until 15 December 2024. Performance attended: November 14.