Lyn Gardner's Weekly Picks

Head over to the Lyric Hammersmith for Daniel Bailey’s revival of Fences, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in the 1950s, about failed black baseball player Troy Maxson, who now works as a garbage collector. It’s a big, soapy family drama about how parents can help their children to grow or stunt them because they can’t let go of their own disappointments. Wilson charted the lives of African Americans through the 20th century in a series of richly textured plays constructing the histories of people whose lives had been overlooked and just dismissed as unimportant. Both on and off stage. Wilson made those lives sing, and he is arguably America’s most important 20th-century playwright. Give this a go; it’s deceptively meaty and knotty. 

Understanding the past in order to make a future was also the purpose of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil” in 1961 while covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann managed the logistics of the mass deportation of millions of Jews to the Nazi death camps but insisted he was just “following orders". Arendt had expected to find herself face-to-face with a monster but found an ordinary man who had simply never examined his actions. Opening at the Arcola this week, Julia Pascal’s The Banalities of Evil: Hannah Arendt, France, 1940 focuses on an earlier episode in Arendt's life when, in France, she was arrested as an undesirable and sent to a camp. The experience shaped her thinking as a historian and philosopher.