Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton in August: Osage County

August: Osage County may take place in a small town to the west of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a location that might not necessarily be expected to land with London theatergoers. But the Steppenwolf Theatre Company production, which opened on November 26 at the National Theatre, opened to reviews at least the equal of the admiring reactions to the play in New York and Chicago. And as Anna D. Shapiro’s staging settled in for an eight-week run at the Lyttelton auditorium, the play’s various creators were breathing a sigh of satisfaction that so potentially site-specific a piece has, as they say, legs.

With eight days of London performances under her belt, Tony nominee Amy Morton, who plays Barbara, the eldest and feistiest of the play’s three daughters, was relishing the quality of response characteristic of the London theater at its best. “They’re such keen listeners, the London audience,” Morton said, speaking by telephone prior to a Sunday matinee which is itself something of a London novelty: only recently has the National been able to mount shows on what is in most cases a British actor’s one day off. “That’s not to say that American audiences aren’t, [but] there’s something a little bit more subdued about London audiences where you just feel a complete and utter attention which is, you know, great.”

Director Anna D. Shapiro and playwright Tracy Letts

Tracy Letts has won a Tony and a Pulitzer for the play, his fourth to date, and looks an odds-on bet to add an Olivier Award to his trophy collection early next year. Letts saw his plays Killer Joe and Bug produced in London early in their respective lives and even appeared on stage here at Notting Hill’s Electric Cinema in 1996 in a play, Max Klapper: A Life In Pictures, written and directed by David Farr and co-starring erstwhile screen star Emily Lloyd. As a result, the 43-year-old dramatist knows the cultural landscape of Britain reasonably well, an awareness that has only been enhanced by having acted himself in such contemporary theatrical classics as The Pillowman (directed, as it happens, by Amy Morton) and Betrayal (appearing opposite Morton) back at his Chicago home base.

Says Letts with regard to August: “I expected a more muted response, vocally, and it has been.” He grins. “I just think the English aren’t as loud as Americans. We’ve found this to be true in the lobby during previews. We couldn’t hear anybody’s conversation, it was really frustrating. Anna [the director Anna D. Shapiro] came to me and said, `I can see their lips moving—they’re talking—but I can’t hear what they’re saying.’ I finally heard an elderly Scottish woman on the way out say to her partner, `That was well depicted.’” Letts chuckles. “It was like, so that was my report to take back from previews: `The Scots think it’s well depicted.’”

In fact, Letts has a theory for the heightened quality of listening in London that Morton has also clocked. “I think it comes from a theater culture that is accustomed to listening to Shakespeare: you’ve got to listen hard to Shakespeare.” Not to mention sit for considerably longer than the time posed by August, which runs almost three and a half hours but with 30 minutes worth of intermission. Hey, that’s nothing compared to Hamlet.

Nor was Letts, speaking as an acting alumnus of numerous British plays Stateside, inclined to adapt or adjust his script to suit a local public. “I had a couple of actors who asked me to change topical references. There aren’t a lot of them in the play but the actors said, `Look, the English just aren’t going to get this,’ and I said, I don’t care, it’s OK that they don’t get it. We do their [British] plays all the time, and we talk about the National Health and the Labour Party and Coronation Street, and we don’t explain those things to the audience. We’re expected to know them, too. So I said, to hell with it. They’ve seen enough American films here that if they don’t get the topical references, it’s not as if the play relies on them anyway.”

Rondi Reed in August: Osage County

The Lyttelton cast, as in New York, is entirely American, though the understudies are a motley crew. Four newcomers have joined the ensemble for this production, including Chelcie Ross in the role originated by Letts’s late father, Dennis, who died earlier this year, and Desperate Housewives and West Wing actor Gary Cole, who among all the company has commandeered the bulk of pre-opening press coverage due to his TV renown. (Luckily, Morton and Tony winners Rondi Reed and Deanna Dunagan are still along for the ride, and more gloriously than ever.)

Morton says that, from her perspective, coming to London was a no-brainer. “When we first started previewing in Chicago, and then when we opened and there was potential buzz about moving the play places, everybody’s first thought was, ‘Let’s go to London.’” Why is that? “It’s London! And also, there’s a bit of history between Steppenwolf and London,” a city that, for instance, hosted Morton and Gary Sinise in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest well before it went on to triumph at the Tonys in New York. “We’ve always wanted to come back.” The Steppenwolf adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath also stormed London in its day—in the same auditorium, in fact, where August is running through January 21.

Morton has very noticeably lost weight during this highly emotional play’s prolonged life across three cities but notes with a wry laugh that the new setting is keeping her sane. “I don’t think I would be surviving if this was any place else but London. It helps being here that it’s a different scenery, different everything. I was saying to one of the cast members that everything about here is so great except doing the show.” She laughs. “I keep forgetting, Oh yeah, I have to do the damn show.”

Amy Morton in August: Osage County

Letts, for his part, was enjoying being in Europe without a return ticket home and was deciding whether to travel to Mannheim, Germany or Copenhagen, Denmark, to catch the foreign-language premieres of his play. “The first translations are happening, though I don’t know. I learned my lesson in the past not to go chasing after other productions after you’ve worked on the original production, but, still, I’m so curious with this piece.”

That leaves Morton and co. to deliver up the play throughout a run that, unusually for the National, is not a repertory engagement but has adopted the conventional Broadway or West End timetable of eight times a week. “We’ve all gotten lost a million times trying to make it to our dressing rooms,” says Morton, “but everyone bar none has said the National is the best place for an actor to work in the world.” Why is that? “It caters to an actor’s needs: There’s a canteen that has good, cheap food right in the building, an after-show bar for the actors, a nurse on-call, a massage therapist, a counselor, someone who comes in and gives us warm ups.”

The actress pauses. “It’s amazing what a little state funding can do. This place is civilized.”