The key to what makes Daniel Bailey’s touring revival of August Wilson’s 1985 play – now at the Lyric Hammersmith – so good is how intimately devastating it is. The sweep of the generational and national tragedy so deftly portrayed by Wilson is always anchored by its impact on one family.
At this production’s heart is Ray Fearon as Troy, a fiercely proud Black man whose struggle to support his family and anger at the racism of 1950s America, on the cusp of painful postwar change, becomes destructively entangled with his inability to let go of the past. As he relentlessly builds a fence around his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is he keeping the world out or trapping his family inside?
Lily Arnold’s gorgeous set – a two-story house façade, with peeling paint and fading features – is a richly realised domestic space in which the drama feels real and rooted. As characters laugh, argue or fight in the yard, we see others at bedroom windows, on the stairs or answering the phone. At some points, the house pivots 360 degrees – briefly revealing, almost in tableaux, the interior. These small, telling moments, coupled with Khalil Madovi’s soulful sound design and the moments when the cast interrupt the naturalism to sing alone to us, add to the production’s richly textured emotional authenticity.
Fearon gives a tour-de-force performance as Troy, his face quickly switching from easy charm to ugly menace when his character feels his authority challenged. He conveys the deep psychological wounds driving Troy from championing the rights of Black workers to belittling his two sons when they seek to live differently to the life he feels has been thrust upon him. Fearon brings every facet of this thornily complicated man to life.
The play never lets Troy off the hook for his worst behaviour. But we also feel the warmth of his friendship with fellow ex-con Jim (a twinkly Everal Walsh), as well as his conflicted sense of responsibility for his brain-damaged brother, Gabriel, played by Simon-Anthony Rhoden with wild-eyed innocence, who believes that his trumpet-playing will open the gates of Heaven for the worthy.
The production shines as an ensemble piece. As Lyons, Troy’s eldest son with a previous partner, who wants to be a musician, Michael Ahomka-Lindsay brings a weary edge of sad resignation to a chancer who knows he will never impress his father. Josh Tedeku is hugely moving as Cory, translating the bottled-up anger of a teenager whose hopes for the future are cruelly derailed by his father into crushingly quiet adult damage.
This revival powerfully evokes the painfully human impact of a country with its boot on the neck of people lost or never given a chance – and not just men. As Troy’s wife, Rose, Madeline Appiah is blisteringly good when he reveals he’s cheated on her, unleashing a righteous tidal wave of hurt and anger over the sacrifices she has made to fit into the role of his wife. Together, she and Fearon scorch the play’s emotional landscape.
