For transatlantic acting at its finest go to the National, see the Chicago-based Steppenwolf company, and marvel at performances so robust yet so punctilious they’d have had Stanislavsky dancing round Red Square. And if you want a good example of that very American genre, the family play, make the same trip – but don’t be disappointed if you find Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning August a bit nearer Dallas or Lillian Hellman’s melodramatic Little Foxes than O’Neill or Tennessee Williams.

Chelcie Ross’s Beverley Weston is a lapsed poet and tireless drinker who disappears from his Oklahoma house and secretly drowns himself. His family gathers for his funeral, and duly does what’s mandatory on such occasions. It falls apart: victim of factors that vary from an incestuous love to one of those monster parents who keep an audience on tenterhooks with their emotional thuggery and loose-cannon destruction.

Had Letts King Lear in mind when he wrote the play? Well, three daughters come on stage; doubts about their inheritance cursorily emerge; but their problem is a matriarch, not a patriarch. The drugged-up widow, Deanna Dunagan’s Vi, decides to “tell the truth”, which means insulting and tormenting her progeny and all else in her line of fire. But only one daughter, Barbara (Amy Morton), stands up to her – actually, tries to strangle her – and the inference is that she, like her mother and mother’s mother, is in danger of becoming a monster.

One of Letts’s achievements is to bring some compassion to this dynastic determinism. Indeed, he has some sympathy for everyone but the slick brother-in-law-to-be who tries to seduce Barbara’s underage daughter. Another is that he keeps us laughing, though often in an appalled sort of way. At its best, here’s a droll Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But there are signs that Letts aspires to write a state-of-America play.

That’s why Barbara laments her country as “an experiment, a hubris, a here-today-gone-tomorrow” collapsing without anyone noticing. I dare say many Americans have been feeling that way, but, even with Vi’s Cheyenne carer coolly observing these wrangling whites from the sidelines, one family can’t signal a national disintegration.

Never mind. Watching manipulative, mischievous Dunagan, or bruised, angry Morton or brassy Rondi Reed or any of Anna Shapiro’s terrific ensemble, you ruefully ask an obvious question. Could a British cast bring such commitment and conviction to this subversive take on Oklahoma!? Surely not.

Box office: 020-7452 3000, to Jan 21

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