August Wilson’s study of a larger-than-life but fatally flawed black, working-class American man in the 1950s stands comparison with Othello and Death of a Salesman in the richness of its characterisation.
In Daniel Bailey’s fine revival, Ray Fearon’s sturdy, fiery Troy Maxson is a loving husband and a showmanlike embroiderer of his own myth: but also a harsh father and a man whose sense of grievance gets the better of his wish to live “a clean, hard, useful life”.
The play is the sixth in Wilson’s monumental decalogy, the Pittsburgh Cycle, exploring black American lives in each decade from the 1900s to the 1990s. It sprawls somewhat, yet it’s a nuanced pleasure to spend almost three hours in the company of Troy, his family and his workmate and drinking buddy Bono.
The play is soused in symbolism but wears it lightly. At the behest of his wife Rose (Madeline Appiah, excellent), illiterate but proud garbageman Troy is building a fence around the modest house they own. He riffs repeatedly on the belief that he once wrestled with death, and that he could have been a professional baseball player if American sport were not institutionally (if no longer legally) stacked against non-whites.
Quaffing his Friday pint of gin on the porch with Bono (loosely agreeable Everal A Walsh) and flirting lubriciously with Rose, Troy is forever burnishing his own self-image. But there are cracks. Troy bought the house with $3000 compensation paid to his brother Gabe for wartime injuries that left him with a metal plate in his head and the belief that he is the angel Gabriel. Gabe cheerfully haunts the house he left in unclear circumstances and must be repeatedly bailed out from prison for causing a nuisance.
Michael Ahomka-Lindsay as Lyons Maxson, Madeline Appiah as Rose Maxson, Everal A. Walsh as Jim Bono in FENCES
Tyler Fayose
The first of two later, crushing revelations is that Troy learned baseball during 15 years in prison. I won’t spoil the second, which drew gasps from large numbers of teenagers in the audience the night I saw it.
From the start Troy is stern with Lyons, his sponging elder son from a previous relationship, who is trying to make it as a musician. And he is unforgivably tyrannical to his and Rose’s son Cory, stamping on his dreams of college football. It’s clear Troy wants his boys to have a better life than he has had: equally clear that he is ruthless in maintaining his status as cock of this particular yard. A poisoned legacy of hardscrabble machismo came down from his own father, a sharecropper.
Fearon gives a towering performance of this hugely challenging role, genial and affectionate at first but fearsome when riled, his teeth set in a savage grimace. Not once but twice, Troy picks up his baseball bat and directly challenges death or the devil to come at him. Though Troy never truly accepts his downfall in the eyes of his loved ones he is diminished by it. Fearon seems physically to age and shrink before our eyes.
The fine supporting cast is augmented by Michael Ahomka-Lindsay as the wheedling Lyons: he contributes a terrific sax solo from the open back of Lily Arnold’s meticulous, periodically rotating set. In a play full of fire and rage, Simon-Anthony Roden could arguably dial Gabe’s mania back a notch or two. Newcomer Josh Tedeku is soulfully boyish as Cory and self-consciously sends his voice down an octave in the later scenes.
In his co-production for the Lyric, Headlong, Leeds Playhouse and HOME in Manchester, Daniel Bailey expertly master’s the play’s ebbs and swells. He’s respectful of the grandeur of Wilson’s writing to a fault. I don’t think it ever crossed the writer’s mind, as he planned the imperial sweep of his great play-sequence, whether the closing explanatory speeches for Rose and others in Fences could be shorter, or whether a single verse of a song about a faithful dog might suffice, instead of seven or eight. A minor nit-pick with a tremendous piece of theatre.