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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Anna D Shapiro.
Cast: Ian Barford, Deanna Dunagan, Kimberly Guerrero, Mariann Mayberry
Description: Anna D Shapiro directs Tracy Letts's black comedy which exposes the dark side of a midwestern American family. Starring Ian Barford, Deanna Dunagan and Kimberly Guerrero.
Trains: Tube/BR: Waterloo 
Phone: 0207452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Superlative acting: Ian Barford as Little Charles, Rondi Reed as Mattie and Deanna Dunagan as the matriarch Violet in the Steppenwolf production at the Lyttelton Theatre at the National
Not since the 1891 English premiere of Ibsen’s Ghosts, with its cryptic talk of syphilis, incest and assisted suicide, has there been a family reunion play more crowded with sensational incident than Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County.
Invoking the spirit of O’Neill, Albee and Shepard a family comes together in Oklahoma for a father’s funeral and breaks up, choice secrets dragged from the closets of reticence.
Produced by Chicago’s famous Steppenwolf company and decorated with Broadway honours Letts’s play breaks with theatre tradition by interpreting family life as slapstick tragedy, black comedy and steaming hot soap opera all rolled into one.
It’s an extravagant mixture, hard to swallow, despite the bursts of cruel laughter that Letts’s characters so often inspire. Excessive elements of soap opera and abrupt oscillations from high pathos to near farcical comedy in Anna D Shapiro’s superlatively acted production inspire disbelief. We are supposed to see in this American family a microcosm of the country’s moral decline, but the conceit strikes a contrived note.
Designer Todd Rosenthal fills the stage with an imposing three-storey country house, its fourth wall removed to make us enthusiastic voyeurs. The disappearance of Beverly Weston’s septuagenarian, a briefly famous poet deep in the forgetfulness of alcohol, precipitates the return of the family members, whose shares in unhappiness seem unfairly pitched well above the national average and bordering on the preposterous.
If only Letts’s people, forever in flight from reality, ran less true to clichéd form. These characters take to suffering and rancour with malicious though comic enthusiasm. Beverly’s widow, Violet, her cruel tongue part of a mouth affected by cancer, has become hopelessly addicted to uppers but this does not diminish the force of her wit.
Her three daughters have long since succumbed to marital disappointment: Barbara trails along with Bill, her almost separated professorial husband, in love with one of his students and on whom she unleashes a withering scorn. Her daughter teeters on the verge of under-age sex. Forty-year-old Karen, after years of unhappiness, is poised to leave for dream-land and marriage. Plainer Ivy secretly romances a dimmish cousin. The funeral dinner, over which Deanna Dunagan’s magnificent, steely, tottering Violet presides like some vicious bird of prey swooping to peck its victims, serves as catalyst for recriminations and revelations. The family remorselessly falls apart, leaves Violet to isolation. The high-voltage acting, displayed particularly by Amy Morton’s impassioned Barbara, Mariann Mayberry as her silly, self-pitying sister and Rondi Reed, majoring in vulgarity as Violet’s sister, finally lends this torrid vision of the American dream turned living nightmare a memorable strangeness.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Good acting, but very cliched and predictable. Too long by an hour.
- Mike, London
Full on American Gothic, updated Addams family. Very good acting, Amy Morton especially.
- Derek, London
for your archives....Helene
- Helene James, Wilmette, Illinois USA
I don't think the reviewer knows what "uppers" are. All the pills mentioned in the play are "downers." Also a downer is a reviewer who doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
Most of his comments are decent insights, even in some cases I disagree with, but Violet Weston never seems "up" in the play and that's enough to strike a serious blow to Mr. de Jongh's credibility.
It's a very good play (and yes, though I live in Texas I saw it a bit over a week ago in London. And a few months ago in New York as well). Recommended.
- Max Farr, Austin, Texas, USA
Get a ticket, an American Ayckbourn, you laugh and wonder why. Gripping and brilliantly acted. Forget the pretentious rubbish about it being an allegory about the US, it is just a very good play. 4 stars
- Philip Warland, London UK
A very polished performance by all concerned, rather long at three hours twenty minutes and at times a little difficult to follow but well worth the wait. It reminded me rather of Festen not least because a significant part of the action also takes place over a spectacularly unpleasant dinner party but it doesn't have the same hard dramatic edge, I got to feel that the punches were slightly pulled and that the comic elements were a little too prominent. I would definitely give it three and a half or four out of five.
- Dave Roberts, London UK
