It must be daunting staging a text with a richly-honoured production history, especially one contained within living memory. Anyone staging Fences — the sixth entry in Wilson’s ‘Pittsburgh Cycle’, and the most renowned — has to contend in the shadow of probably the greatest concentration of acting greatness to have constellated since its debut in 1985. The lives of Troy and Rose Maxson and their orbit of black, working-class Pittsburghers have been shuttled through the late James Earl Jones’s mellifluous baritone, Mary Alice’s brassy regalness (both from the original stage production), and, of course, the volcanic performances of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in both the Broadway revival and 2016 film.

That said, in his director’s note, Ivan Alexei Ampiah asks that we leave the play’s performance baggage behind for the night, so I’ll take him at his request. Instead, he hones in on the text’s “own ferocious beating heart” - a “raw and searing palpability” captured expertly in the performances of Aker Okoye, playing Troy, and Kayden Best as Rose.

This is not to suggest the ensemble is sidelined - each actor shines uniquely, and across the board the accents are terrific. Tel Chiuri is line-perfect as Jim, Troy’s oldest friend and drinking buddy. Talia Hardie, as the elder son Lyons, brings a charming relief to the play’s unrelenting bleakness. Samira Tahlil is emotive and gently moving as Troy’s brother Gabriel, sporting a brain injury from his war service and left to roam the streets half-deluded, singing of angels and judgment. But Okoye’s Troy, an embittered soul whose constant self-aggrandising spills into fantasy, is no less delusional for all his groundedness. From the gap between the heights of his imagination and the harsh reality of his traumatic life flows the source of the play’s tragedy.

“Each actor shines uniquely, and across the board the accents are terrific”

It’s fascinating to decode what makes Okoye such a charismatic performer. From the outset, bantering with Chiuri, he’s abrupt, interrogative and enthralling funny. We see exactly what endears Troy to others despite his one-upmanship, his sexual aggressiveness and his constant fibs - all belying a dark psyche. In the next scene, we watch how these qualities make him the perfect bully of his son Cory (Matthew Weatherhead), whom he loathes out of that vicious form of jealousy endemic in those to whom life has been horrid. When Troy riffs on his abusive upbringing - his adolescent life of crime and its climax in a jail stint for murder - we despair for him. It’s a fleeting, cathartic moment of self-awareness. But it’s soon followed by more lies, more fantasy-weaving, further abuse of his downtrodden wife and children. Towards the end, we’re wishing for something - anything - to pluck this man from his web of self-deceit and put a stop to the cycle of reverberatory pain. It never comes. Okoye’s performance is punishing, and I applaud him for reining such a tragically intolerable man within the remit of our sympathy.

“I applaud him for reining such a tragically intolerable man within the remit of our sympathy”

I admit, though, his ferocity threatens to overwhelm at times - it’s to Best’s talent that Rose never shrinks from him, imbued with a soft, unwilting goodliness. Her standout moment comes with the revelation of Troy’s affair, the only scene taking place in the upper bedroom, a set piece otherwise strangely neglected throughout the production. Storming onto the metrodeck all of a sudden, the actors feel hoisted out of reach, reduced in volume, and we are distanced from the most intimate part of the play. It does little to dampen Best’s explosive monologue, but I wonder where different direction might have delivered this scene - and the one following, where Rose takes in Troy’s newborn daughter but trades his place in her life for the baby’s.

The set is, I suppose, functional, though the painted flats are a little crude and clash against the three-dimensionality of the performances. The demarcation between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’, symbolised by a lone doorframe and a figurative wall, became confusing not least to the actors, who ignored it several times and appeared to cross through the invisible barrier between rooms. I wonder if the set could’ve been more fluid - keeping it as a static set of spaces meant each scene was compact (and, occasionally, cramped). Sure, Fences is a play about confinement, but the hemmed-in nature of the blocking takes this a bit too literally, and at the expense of another central idea: the dream of liberation, denying actors the power that might have come with greater freedom to roam.

In 2024, an era more perceptive of the systems of power that govern us, I suppose we’re left to question whether the injustice of Troy’s life mitigates the pain he enacts on others. That’s the position his family is led to by the end - but I’ll say no more for fear of spoiling. Just know that director Ampiah and his talented cast more than uphold the strength of Wilson’s convictions. In baseball terms Troy Maxson would appreciate: this Fences is a four-bagger.