Review: Elokuu

A BLACK COMEDY ABOUT TRAGIC FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

August spins the unfulfilled hopes of three generations around the stage and in their faces.


Tracy Letts (b. 1965), who is also known as an actress, has wanted to take American theatre back to a larger size and society, away from the small-scale expression that dominated it.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning August depicts the already familiar problems of the American family by combining a harrowing epic tragedy with a sharp black comedy.
The sudden disappearance of his father brings the divided Weston family to their old home in Oklahoma. The family is a strong institution, even when questioned, and there is always a desire for relationships to be healed somewhere inside.

All 13 performances deserve nothing but praise. Ritva Valkama as Violet Weston is, of course, the main attraction, and at the beginning the audience’s desire to laugh is greater than the embodiment of malaise that takes sedatives to give rise to. Violet wants to control her adult daughters by being mean under the guise of a truth-teller.
As daughters, Riitta Havukainen, Heidi Herala and Aino Seppo bring out the sisters’ different personalities. Heidi Herala as Ivy, in particular, as a serious-looking loner, embodies the pain of living in one place wonderfully.
Violet’s sister Mattie Fae, played by Leena Uotila, creates the figure of a perfect, universal nagging woman, who is knocked out by Seppo Maijala as the colourless husband Charlie in a fine scene where the man refuses to put up with any more after 38 years of scolding.

In Kari Heiskanen’s direction, the scenes change quickly with the help of a rotating stage, and the events overlap to be partly simultaneous. The impression is created as if uncontrollable things are being examined through a confused mind. Family Reunion, which turns into a funeral, is a series of collisions that carry the story through soap opera-like short scenes inexorably towards the big reveal.
In an interview with the Telegraph in November about the London premiere of the play, Letts says that he does not understand why people prefer August to be an ordinary sitcom rather than a social statement on the collective psychosis of the Bush era.

August’s raunchy text makes fun of things that don’t really make fun of you. Still, almost every scene contains an element of laughter, whether it is about a bulimic vomiting on the funeral table or an aging husband’s preference for young girls.
Letts’s verbality, interpreted by the actors of the City Theatre, is so apt that you have to laugh even if you do evil. If you watched the play again, would you get through the laughter?