Fences, Theatre Royal, Bath, review In a series of ten plays, Wilson, who died in 2005, charted the black experience in America in each decade of 20th century. He isn't an easy dramatist. Like much of his work, Fences, set in the 1950s, sometimes feels clotted with clumsy exposition, and an inability on the part of the writer to recognise that less can sometimes mean more. Henry plays Troy Maxson, a 53-year old municipal garbage collector in Pittsburgh who in his youth was a star baseball player. In the first scene we watch him shooting the breeze and sharing a bottle after work with his best friend Jim Bono, and he also has a bantering, still amorous relationship with his wife, Rose. We learn that he nurses a justified grievance over the fact that he was forced to play baseball in the far less lucrative Negro League when a colour bar still operated in the game. Troy also purloined his brother's disability benefit, awarded for an injury in the Second World War which left him mentally confused and vulnerable, in order to buy the family home. Worst of all, he is actively unpleasant to his two sons, especially the teenage Cory, whose promise as an American football player Troy seems perversely determined to thwart. Henry lays bare this contradictory character with both lucidity and power, and his bruising final row with Cory is almost too painful to watch. There is terrible pain, too, in the revelation that his apparently happy marriage isn't all that it seems. Yet Henry also finds Troy's battered magnificence as he taunts death to come and get him and lays bare the pain of his early years, which made him the man he is. Paulette Randall's excellent production, punctuated with an evocative blues score by Delroy Murray, finds all the drama's strengths, and there is a fine design of the family's dilapidated house and backyard by Libby Watson. In a fine supporting ensemble there are especially strong and moving performances from Tanya Moodie as the spirited wife and Ashley Zhangazha as the son who comes to hate his father. It's a cracking production of a play which, despite its verbosity, achieves many passages of searching psychological insight and shattering dramatic power. Until Sat, then touring. Tickets and tour info: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk