Dundee Rep
Five stars
The Westons are reunited on Alex Lowde's revolving open plan set after Beverley disappears shortly after hiring young Native American woman Johnna to keep house and look after an increasingly delirious Violet. What follows over almost three and a half hours is a slow burning tragi-comic explosion of collective dysfunction, with all its secrets, lies, failures and flaws exposed.
Led by a magnificent pairing of Ann Louise Ross as Violet and Emily Winter as Barbara, every one of the thirteen actors onstage is heroic in putting flesh on Letts' frequently wise-cracking script. There may be much talk of struggle, but it is the serenity and quiet strength of Betty Valencia's Johnna who becomes the play's moral heart.
On one level, Letts is laying bare the monstrous and monumental mess of family life by way of a series of increasingly extreme revelations. On another, the play is a microcosm, not just of a country in free-fall, but an entire system in which a basic capacity for love has been broken by corrupted western values.
Five stars
Everyone is on different drugs in Tracy
Letts' Pulitzer Prize winning American epic, which receives its
Scottish premiere in new Dundee Rep artistic director Andrew Panton's
revival, a decade after it first appeared on Broadway and the West
End. It's not just the booze and pills that the ageing heads of the
Weston clan Beverley and Violet cling to for comfort that makes
communication between them so impossible. It's the assorted emotional
crutches their three daughters, Barbara, Ivy and Karen alongside
their extended family hold on to for dear life that leaves everyone
so desperately isolated from each other.
The Westons are reunited on Alex Lowde's revolving open plan set after Beverley disappears shortly after hiring young Native American woman Johnna to keep house and look after an increasingly delirious Violet. What follows over almost three and a half hours is a slow burning tragi-comic explosion of collective dysfunction, with all its secrets, lies, failures and flaws exposed.
Led by a magnificent pairing of Ann Louise Ross as Violet and Emily Winter as Barbara, every one of the thirteen actors onstage is heroic in putting flesh on Letts' frequently wise-cracking script. There may be much talk of struggle, but it is the serenity and quiet strength of Betty Valencia's Johnna who becomes the play's moral heart.
On one level, Letts is laying bare the monstrous and monumental mess of family life by way of a series of increasingly extreme revelations. On another, the play is a microcosm, not just of a country in free-fall, but an entire system in which a basic capacity for love has been broken by corrupted western values.
The Herald, September 7th 2017
ends
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