"Fences". Oxford Playhouse

Two years ago almost to the day, Oxford Playhouse staged Headlong Theatre’s production of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 family drama A Raisin in the Sun. In its day it was the first play by a Black woman to run on Broadway, and it was a theatrical breakthrough, confronting middle-class, white audiences with the everyday lives of African American families, and the daily discrimination with which they had to cope.

Now Headlong is back with August Wilson’s Fences. Set in the same time-period as Raisin, it was written many years later, in 1985. Where Hansberry’s play was a manifesto calling for change and looking to the future, Wilson’s is a chronicle of a life that never reached its full potential. The two plays stand at opposite ends of the same decade, looking in. Both are astonishing pieces of drama. But Fences, in the hands of director Daniel Bailey, is also an elegy written in vernacular poetry.

When he wrote Fences, August Wilson was trying to give white audiences a different way to look at Black Americans; to show them that the garbage collector who came round every week was a man affected by pride, honour, love, betrayal and despair. And in Troy Maxson he created an anti-hero of Shakespearian proportions. Troy is his own worst enemy: a philanderer, a bully, a drunkard, and even, in the past, a murderer. But Fences forces us to ask, would he have been these things if the institutional barriers of racism hadn’t stopped him from reaching his potential? Was his failure to become a professional baseball player down to his own limitations, or to the apartheid system that stopped Black players competing in the lucrative leagues enjoyed by white teams? Troy is under no illusions: ‘You born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate’. The great achievement of this production is that it offers no easy answers. And in so doing, it makes Troy both a symbolic figurehead and a three-dimensional human being.

The plot is pure slice of life: Act One takes place over one day in 1957, when we meet Troy, his wife Rose, his war-damaged brother Gabe, and his sons Cory and Lyons. It’s all groundwork, as the tensions, resentments and temptations in the family bed in. And for an Oxford audience unaccustomed to the rhythms and accents of 1950s Philadelphia, it’s an hour to get attuned to a time and place far removed from Queen’s Lane Coffee House.

Act Two is all consequences, from unintended babies to parental showdowns, to the final reckoning with death. It’s a fanfare for a common man, and it leaves you feeling that no man is common.

Troy is a great role, and some outstanding actors have played him over the years: James Earl Jones, Denzel Washington, Yaphet Kotto, Lenny Henry. Ray Fearon more than earns his place alongside those giants, and not only because his US accent – like the entire company’s – is 100% convincing. His presence crackles with pent-up aggression, thwarted ambition and misplaced love. As he builds the fences of the title around his homestead, you can see and feel them becoming both boundary and prison with every cut of the saw-blade. Alongside him, Madeline Appiah, as Rose, embodies both mater familias and wronged woman. Appiah played Hermione in last year’s Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Winter’s Tale, and here again she stands up to a damaged husband with dignity and self-sacrifice.

As with their production of A Raisin in the Sun, Headlong place the action in a set which teeters on the edge of realism. Troy and Rose’s home looks like a humble construction, but from time to time neon lights shoot through the gutters and round edges of rooms. It revolves to suggest time passing, but also to reveal a hidden life behind the two-dimensional façade. The outward face of simple poverty belies an inner world of music, light and artifice. As the house spins, Michael Ahomka-Lindsay plays the saxophone live from an upper-storey balcony, and it’s as if the potential seething inside this downtrodden family flickers briefly before the next scene returns them to the daily grind. It’s details like these that make this production not merely a revival but a revelation of the original play.

But Fences keeps its smallest and best surprise for the final scene. That’s when we meet the latest addition to the Maxson family, eight-year-old Raynell. She is played by no fewer than six girls over the course of the run, so it’s impossible to review them all. But for each of them it’s their first time on a professional stage, and on the night I was there, Raynell was the star of the show, completely unfazed in front of a packed audience, oozing with confidence and natural talent. It was like seeing Bella Ramsey for the first time in their breakthrough role as Little Lady Mormont in Game of Thrones. After an evening spent watching potential thwarted, ambitions crushed and lives fenced in, the sight of an eight-year-old actor making her professional debut felt unexpectedly hopeful. Troy Maxson never became what he might have been. Raynell has no idea yet what she might become.