Every Friday evening, his working week over, Troy Maxson comes home with a pint of liquor to jaw with his old buddy Jim Bono and fire up his wife, Rose.

Like them, we quickly fall under his spell.

Bert LaBonté as Troy Maxson in Sydney Theatre Company’s Fences. Photo © Daniel Boud.

A Pittsburgh city garbage collector by day, Troy (brilliantly played here by Bert LaBonté) is a natural raconteur, a born kidder. At times, he’s a barely tolerable bullshitter, but there’s always a magnetic quality to the self-hype. In part it’s created by the street-corner eloquence Wilson gives him. Mostly it comes from Troy’s own belief in it.

He could have made it in the Big Leagues, he boasts. His thwarted baseball career is a subject he returns to endlessly. Even now, at 53, he says he could still smack a home run off a Sandy Koufax pitch. Why, he’s even wrestled with Death himself and won. Took him three days to do it, he says, but he won.

Seems there’s nothing Troy Maxson can’t do if he sets his mind to it – except finishing a little garden fence for Rose,...