August Wilson’s Fences Tickets

Fences is a magnificent family drama written by the remarkable US playwright August Wilson, the great chronicler of African American life during the 20th century. Imagine King Lear rewritten as a soap drama and relocated to 1950s Pittsburgh, where Troy Maxson is a man who believes he could have been a contender if his career as a professional baseball player had not been thwarted by the colour of his skin. Flawed, complex and bruised, Troy works as a garbage collector, and instead of encouraging his own sons, just as the civil rights movement is beginning to grow, he seems to be doing his best to blight their opportunities, just as his were blighted.  So Troy is no hero. Wilson has written a fascinating psychological portrait within a play which is both epic and soapy, the latter in the best possible way. It’s a story which grips as it picks up the stone of family life and finds what is lurking underneath. It has a forensic quality.  It’s a drama that comes garlanded. It won four Tony’s for its premiere in 1987 (including Best Play), and it also scooped a Pulitzer Prize. Wilson was only the third African-American to win. So definitely not to be sniffed at. Wilson himself said of the play—hugely influential on many playwrights, including UK ones such as Roy Williams—that “although there are no white characters in Fences, the white world is very much there, because the white world exerts a pressure on that family from the outside. Racism is a part of Black life in America. So if you are going to write about Blacks, you have to write about racism, because that is part of their lives.” He does it with no holding back but also real delicacy.  The Lyric Hammersmith production—directed by Daniel Bailey with an adept jazz-inflected approach—already comes with some rave reviews from its Leeds Playhouse run. By all accounts, Ray Fearon as Troy really delivers. He is “horribly compelling as this tragic figure, a man made monstrous by circumstance," proclaimed the Times, while the Stage was full of admiration for Fearon’s physicality: “His fists become projectiles as his swinging arms strike spots in the air.”