Blimey: Brit Crits Love “August”
“August: Osage County” has opened in London, and the critics there are impressed. (By the way, I hope your family Thanksgiving dinners are more serene than the dinner scene in “August.”) Not as over-the-moon impressed as their American counterparts, but full of vigorous praise just the same. Samples here and here. Michael Billington analyses something that has always bothered me about Tracey Letts’s play: the eldest daughter’s speech about her father’s belief that America is an experiment that has failed. “To me, this is actually the weakest part of the play. In ‘Death of a Salesman’ or ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ a family or a marriage organically acquires a metaphoric resonance: here the message is too palpably delivered via set speeches.”
