Five years on from their excellent co-production of “Jitney”, the Headlong theatre company and Leeds Playhouse have returned to August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” with a “striking” revival of “Fences”, said Catherine Love in The Guardian.
Wilson’s 1950s-set play, which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1987, is a “drama of family, masculinity and thwarted ambition”, which paints “national issues of race and inequality on a domestic canvas”.
The play’s focus is the Maxson family and its patriarch Troy, a one-time baseball player who was robbed of professional success owing to the colour of his skin, and who now works as a garbage man. “Ray Fearon is horribly compelling as this tragic figure, a man made monstrous by circumstance.”
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It’s a tough play, in which “brutality and injustice” are “shot through with fleeting moments of possibility” – but director Daniel Bailey’s staging deftly blends “gritty realism” with “playful theatricality”.
Wilson is not known for his subtlety, said Matt Barton in The Stage. “Where most playwrights might allow themselves one big, blustery speech, that’s effectively [his] default mode.” Yet in this terrifically performed production, the speechifying lands as “muscular, rather than cumbrous” – and the set-piece confrontations are “phenomenally powerful”.
With slow-building intensity, the play eventually attains the “heart-aching weight of an Arthur Miller tragedy”, said Holly Williams in The Times. And Fearon’s “superb” performance is matched by those of Madeline Appiah as Troy’s wife Rose, and Michael Ahomka-Lindsay and Josh Tedeku as their two sons.
Appiah’s understated turn does much to leaven the play’s prolixity and heaviness, said Jim Keaveney on WhatsOnStage. Simon-Anthony Rhoden is also excellent as Troy’s brother Gabriel, who suffered a brain injury during wartime service that has “left him in childlike innocence. His appearances lift the play with warm humour and pathos in a role that could too easily be played for laughs.”
Oxford Playhouse until 3 October, then touring; headlong.co.uk
