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Radio GolfPart of The August Wilson Century CycleDateline: 6th July, 2008The final play in August Wilson's epic cycle does not disappoint. Indeed, Londoners can relish the opportunity to see this play when it finally makes its British debut at the Tricycle in the autumn. It is introduced by a fellow playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks, who wittily pays homage to the chronicler of a century, a writer who she delights in reminding us was as interested in the "bread pudding" of life as what most others would regard as matters of greater global significance. This work, completed in 2005 shortly before the playwright's death, offers a change of focus. Rather than dirt poor chancers from the working classes, its main characters Harmond and Mame Wilks and Roosevelt Hicks are determinedly upwardly mobile in a Pittsburgh that can now at least conceive a black mayor, if not actually appoint one. We have now reached 1995, not quite a century after the events in Gem of the Ocean took place but the cultural differences between the two eras are lifetimes apart, especially from a Black standpoint. Wilson emphasises this by using central characters with distant links to a pair from the earlier play. Wilks is a property developer with political ambitions who, as the play opens, seems on the brink of becoming the first black mayor of Pittsburgh. However, while this distant descendant of Caesar is eminently respectable, he has indulged in one or two business practices that are on the sharp end of decent. One of them comes to light with the arrival of Elder Barlow, also known as Old Joe. The semi-vagrant still has the experiences of his grandfather, give or take a great- or two, in his blood. Seemingly a nobody, he quickly becomes a thorn in the flesh of Wilks and Hicks, with a dogged determination to protect the house where he used to live, in the company of the legendary Aunt Ester. That should not be a serious problem to an upstanding, if hard-nosed businessman, even though the ramshackle property is in the middle of a projected housing development. While Roosevelt Hicks is going from strength to strength doing business with white men who humour him because of the tax breaks that his skin colour brings and talking about golf on the radio, his partner begins to face moral dilemmas that ultimately reveal his character, as a life-changing decision looms. These are all colourful characters, as is an ex-con, odd job man Sterling who in one speech at the end of the play explains once and for all the difference between a "Negro" and a "Nigger" in an object lesson to us all about impressions and perceptions. Even though the people at it portrays are in many cases from a different class and generation from any that we have observed over the previous nine decades, Radio Golf is a characteristic August Wilson piece. It encapsulates the mood and interests of his people at a fixed moment in time and pleasingly, as the last play in this magnificent sequence, is both up to standard and revealing. August Wilson's Century Cycle of plays will undoubtedly prove to be one of the major theatrical achievements of the last few decades. Anybody who is lucky enough to acquire a set of these books will derive hours of pleasure from reading them. Even better, fans should try to catch Radio Golf on stage in order to get a taste of this writer's genius. After that, let's start up a movement to persuade Nicholas Hytner to stage the sequence on the South Bank. Philip Fisher
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