Pamela Rabe is one of Australia’s most acclaimed actors and last year she got rave reviews, not to mention a few awards, for her role in the play August: Osage Country. Now after a highly praised season in Sydney, the show arrives at Black Swan State Theatre as part of the 2025 Perth Festival.
Speaking to OUTinPerth Rabe said she’d seen Tracy Letts’ play several times over the years, but until director Eamon Flack called her up and suggested she play the role of matriarch Violet Violet Weston.
“I saw it on Broadway, and then I saw the Steppenwolf Company, the original company do it at the Ros Packer Theatre in Sydney, and then I saw Simon Thorpe’s production for the Melbourne Theatre Company, which, to be honest, I thought was the best of the three.” Rabe said.
Presented with Flack’s proposal that she immediately answered, “Yes!”
The director and actor had a string of successful collaborations under their belts.
“We first the The Glass Menagerie at Belvoir Street a decade ago, and since then we’ve done Ibsen’s Ghosts and Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard, I love working with him.” Rabe said.
“It was the excitement of just being able to do that again which floated my boat, but then when he started talking about the rest of the cast as well, I knew I was going to love it.”
Written by playwright Tracy Letts the tragi-comedy made its debut in 2007 at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. When the show was produced on Broadway it was named Best Play at the 2008 Tony Awards. Black Swan’s Artistic Director Kate Champion has described it as one of her favourite works.
The play tells the story of a family in Oklahoma who face tragedy and complex relationships over several weeks.
For the Sydney production Rabe was joined by an impressive cast, many of them are also appearing in the west coast staging. While some familiar Perth faces including Amy Mathews and Will O’Mahony were also in the Sydney run. Rabe describes the cast as a collection of people who use their mouths as their weapons to deliver a work that is “excruciatingly funny, but also devastating emotionally.”
Rabe says the staging for this production is quite different to how the work is traditionally seen, the restrictions on stage size meant they had to be creative and it worked to the shows advantage.
Usually the stage contains a three story set, a life sized Doll’s House, something that couldn’t be achieved in the space available – but the real attraction is the quality of the writing, and Rave says the way the show is staged for this production really showcases the beauty of the script.
“What it did was, it cracked open an extraordinary piece of writing and just unlocked the poetry and the metaphor of the play.”
Rave describes the show as one that clearly meets the definition of a classic, while it was written during the time of George W Bush being the US President, its resonates remarkably in today’s political landscape.
“The play is such an extraordinary, skillfully written thing, that it can move and grow with that with time, and we really only discovered that as we worked on it, and then when we performed in front of an audience, we realised what a powerhouse it is, its extraordinary.” Rabe said.
Sydney audiences and critics had high praise for the show, Rabe describes the reaction on the opening night.
“They literally catapulted one of their seats for a standing ovation. I’ve never experienced that, and that never stopped, it was that way for every performance.”
Rabe’s character of Violet has been described as one of theatre’s ‘great monsters’.
“She is monstrous, but she’s also deeply flawed, deeply in pain, complex and brutally funny.” Rabe said. “The changes that the character goes through during the course of the play are extraordinary, wonderfully challenging, and and delicious to play with!”
Playing a monstrous character is not a new experience for Pamela Rabe, the last timer we chatted was almost a decade ago when she about to make her debut on in the television show Wentworth as conniving prison guard Joan ‘the Freak’ Fergusson.
Rabe said she’s been blown away by the success of the Australian drama that ran for over 100 episodes. Giving her the rare opportunity to play a character over a long period of time. All though she jokes, her character did spend an entire season off-screen presumed dead.
As the final season was filmed during the Covid pandemic, the long running cast never really got to say goodbye to each other.
“We finished filming that final those final episodes while Melbourne was in lockdown, one of its the first of its major four months long lockdowns, and so there were incredibly strict protocols.
“We couldn’t hug each other to say goodbye. We couldn’t have a wrap party to celebrate what we’d done. But they gave us all a teal hoodie on the understanding that at some point we would get a phone call saying, let’s have a wrap party and a reunion at some point.
“I still haven’t had that phone call or an email.” Rabe said, indicating she’s ready to celebrate.
August: Osage County runs from 27th February until 16th March at the State Theatre Centre. Get tickets now.
