STAGEFences
Duchess Theatre
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Lenny Henry full occupies the role of Troy Maxson, the embittered garbage man and patriarch robbed of his shot at the baseball big time.
REVIEW
Lenny Henry is immense. His physicality has been a feature of our screens for decades. Could this fierce giant of a man subsume Troy Maxson or would this sprawling and complex protagonist of August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning play eat Lenny alive.
The duel was over quickly - Troy wins big and early - and for the rest of Paulette Randall's revival we are fully in the company of a Pittsburgh garbage man whose dreams of baseball superstardom were curtailed by racism.
Max talks long and hard, in vernacular, in anecdote and at ease with the N-word. The result is street poetry at its most beguiling which, like the Blues score that underpins the drama, makes pretty some uncomfortable truths about 1950s America.
Whether Max's mission to visit those lessons on his offspring are founded in duty or bitterness or part of an inevitable cycle of conditioning is the question under examination.
Lenny Henry's confidence matches his ability for Troy is a gargantuan part, created by James Earl Jones in 1987, and required gymnastic turns of charm, brutality, tears and cheers.
Even towards the end, when we have witnessed the full spectrum of Troy's bullying and selfishness, it is not entirely clear whether he's hero or villain.
His son Cory (Ashley Zhangazha) embodies that dilemma. He is courted by a football scout but Troy, scarred by his own thwarted ambitions, sees to it that his son is undone even though the times are marginally more enlightened.
"Why don't you like me?", asks Cory before learning the truth - Max provides a roof and food but "I don't have to like ya."
So Cory has full cause to perpetuate the Oedipal hatreds but can never entirely escape his father's emotional tug. Same too of Rose, the wife who commits more to the marriage than the man when his betrayal arrives at their small, dusty plot.
All credit to the cast. Tanye Moodie as soft-spoken Rose matches Henry for playfulness and fury while Colin McFarlane as his drinking buddy Jim Bono is a wonderfully rich and responsive audience for Max's tale tales (and an unusual moral milestone against which to mark Max's drift).
All is not entirely well with the play. The role of Max's war-wounded brother is silly and superfluous (and, incidentally, extends the climax beyond its satisfying peak) while the work itself is perhaps less nuanced that it thinks it is.
Nevertheless, this is still an involving, nourishing and lyrical piece of work and, pleasingly, Lenny Henry is more than a match for its whims and wiles.
Until Sept 14, nimaxtheatres.com
