Lyn Gardner's Top Ten Reasons to See Fences at the Lyric Hammersmith
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[*Fences*](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/august-wilson-fences-tickets) 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](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/venue/lyric-hammersmith-london) 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.”
Maybe the power of the play resides in the fact that **Wilson** recognised that he had to be scrupulously honest when writing, arguing that, “writing is a process of self-discovery. If you are honest, you are forced to confront the part of yourself that you always have a tendency to run away from, which is the deepest part.”
**Wilson’**s plays have often been compared to those of **Arthur Miller** in their construction and interrogation of the American way of life. But actually **Wilson** had never seen a **Miller** play when he began writing plays after a long period as a poet. But he saw the value of theatre and said he was “fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the [theatre] audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.”
*Fences* is a wordy play (there are many, many words), but although on its surface *Fences* might at first glance look like a typical late 20th-century naturalistic play, it has an enticing dirty poetry and a pulsating musical rhythm. **Bailey**’s revival very much plays to that, and quite rightly. Wilson is not just a black **Arthur Miller**. He was much more of a pioneer, offering a glimpse into lives that, until he came along, had seldom been seen or acknowledged.
Wilson knew the importance of knowing your history: hence why *Fences* is part of a ten-play cycle exploring the African-American experience in every decade of the 20th century. He knew that looking back was necessary, saying, "We are where we are because of the things that happened prior to this. But we live in a society where we forget what happened two weeks ago.”
In an interview when *Fences* premiered in 1987, **Wilson** said, ‘I think one of the reasons I wrote *Fences* is that our parents have shielded that from us, trying to protect us from the indignities of things they had suffered being Black. My mother never told me that she went down to Woolworth’s 5-and-10 and they wouldn’t give you a bag because you were Black. That’s not the kind of thing that you want your kid to know, so you keep that away from your kid. She would accept that. I think the thing to do is to pass it on as opposed to holding it in there. I think once we begin to do that, and we understand that we can participate in a society as Africans—if we do that, then we are participating from our strength, from our strongest point. That is our difference, because Black people and white people do not think alike, and that is our basic philosophical difference, our different approaches to life. We are living in a white society, and that is a dominant thing, and we try to adjust ourselves to fit in, when I think that white America has to accept us on our terms—the fact that we do things differently.”
The title has many meanings and doesn’t just refer to the fence which Troy is constructing around his clapboard house and yard. It is about the fences that racism builds, but also the fences Troy tries to erect to confine his family and keep the world at bay.
[August Wilson's Fences](https://www.londontheatredirect.com/play/august-wilson-fences-tickets) plays at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre from 6 to 31 October 2026. Book your tickes today.