Fences
August Wilson
Headlong, Leeds Playhouse, Lyric Hammersmith and HOME Manchester production
HOME, Manchester
November 3-7, 2026; 3hrs
Fences, August Wilson’s 1958 Pulitzer-prize winning classic, is the sixth of the playwright's American Century Cycle of 10 plays tracing the black American experience decade by decade across the 20th Century.
This first major revival in more than a decade - from HOME, Leeds Playhouse and the Lyric Hammersmith - is set in Pittsburgh in 1957 and centres on Troy Maxson, a former Negro League baseball player, who spent 15 years of his youth and early adulthood in prison and is now a garbage collector.
The weight of Troy's past creates complicated and dysfunctional relationships with his wife and sons, who are on a quest for a better life. It's a moot point whether the symbolic fence Troy builds around the family home is it to keep people out or to keep people in. Meanwhile, his wife Rose holds everything together.
Directed by award winning director Daniel Bailey, the stellar cast members give outstanding performances in a production that, by contemporary standards, feels dialogue-heavy and is unfortunately sometimes delivered at an inaudible pace.
Playing Troy, Ray Fearon creates a flawed character highly reminiscent of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman – both playwrights exploring big themes such as capitalism, racism and inequality through the forum of family life. Madeline Appiah as Rose delivers a superbly poignant and understated performance as his heroic and undervalued wife, while Everal Walsh, as the loyal family friend Jim Bono, gives an equally memorable performance.
Special mention must go to designer Lily Arnold’s distinctive and ambitious recreation of a small two-storey Pittsburgh house, which creates an uncanny sense of place and time but also switches, courtesy of a revolving stage, to a more abstract look behind the apparent reality.
Music - described as serving not as background but as an additional language to the story - was for me the least successful part of the production. As the programme note makes clear (and a beautiful and comprehensively-detailed printed programme it is, too) Jazz and Blues in its many different forms were prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s and yet the promise of embedding characters with "their own cosmic musicalities" was not fulfilled - nor did it become a key story telling device.
Tonight’s visit was a trip back in time in more ways than one - to a time when HOME housed the Library Theatre company and offered four-week seasons of repertory theatre with plays of this calibre.
Too frequently now, HOME's theatre offering struggles to match the popularity of the cinemas, bars and restaurants. More co-productions of this standard might well revive HOME as a place people visit for theatre as frequently as they do film.
More info and tickets here
