Written by August Wilson
Directed by Daniel Bailey
LEEDS PLAYHOUSE
★★★★☆
“Some people build fences to keep people out and other people build fences to keep people in.” In August Wilson’s Fences, those barriers become both metaphor and battleground, and this wonderfully captivating production by Headlong at Leeds Playhouse understands that the most formidable walls are often the ones we carry inside us. Director Daniel Bailey leans into the glorious musicality of Wilson’s muscular and poetic writing, and ensures this very naturalistic production soars all the way from 1950s Pittsburgh to St Peter’s Gate.
In the seventh of Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle”, the Maxson family home is presided over by Troy, a former baseball player whose thwarted sporting ambitions and experiences of racism have hardened into a worldview as uncompromising as the man himself. He is a provider, a husband and a father, but also a man who has mistaken control for love and self-protection for wisdom.
Ray Fearon delivers a beautifully measured performance that allows for all the complexities and contradictions of a man who can be both deeply lovable and monstrous. His Troy is a magnificent creation, swaggering into the backyard as though it were his personal kingdom, dispensing hard-earned wisdom alongside home truths that are considerably less wise. He can be funny, infuriating, tender and terrifying within the same conversation. Crucially, in this production his failures are allowed to sit alongside his wounds, leaving us to wrestle with the uncomfortable truth that damaged people can cause damage without being entirely defined by it.
The performances around him are equally finely calibrated. This is an ensemble that listens. Conversations overlap, tempers flare, jokes land and old grievances surface with the messy spontaneity of family life. Nothing feels artificially performative, instead the actors create the delicious illusion that we have wandered into a household where decades of history continue just beyond the edges of the stage. At the heart of these are wonderfully judged performances by Madeline Appiah as wife, Rose, Everal A Walsh as best friend Bono and Simon-Anthony Rhoden as his brain-damaged brother Gabriel.
The unfinished fence running through the backyard becomes an increasingly potent visual metaphor for Troy’s determination to keep danger out, while simultaneously keeping those closest to him from moving freely beyond his reach. Set Designer, Lily Arnold has created a vivid design where there is no white picket fence in this American Dream but in its stripped back simplicity there is a real beating heart in this home. Turning with the times and events, this house both lures you in to bear witness and can enthrall as it throbs with passion.
Wilson’s dialogue is rich with humour, rhythm and vernacular poetry, and the production wisely resists the temptation to gild it. There is plenty of laughter here, but it is laughter with splinters. Beneath the banter lurk questions of race, masculinity, fatherhood, ambition and the inheritance of disappointment from one generation to the next. At almost three hours, the drama occasionally dips and its episodic structure means the momentum ebbs in places. Yet the emotional accumulation is formidable and arresting. The final scenes make for a perhaps satisfying wrapping up of this family drama yet risk veering into unnecessary exposition.
Overall this is a beautiful production that trusts actors, text and audience in equal measure. Captivating, compassionate and impressively naturalistic, Headlong’s Fences lets its characters breathe rather than turning them into symbols. The result is a bruising, beautifully observed portrait of a family trying, imperfectly, to love one another across the barriers life has built
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