August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean

August Wilson spent twenty-five years writing ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, nine of them set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he grew up. He left school at fifteen, educated himself in the public library, and did not finish the cycle until the year he died, in 2005. Two of the plays won the Pulitzer. Together they are the largest sustained account of Black American life anyone has written for a stage, and they are usually performed as individual plays by companies that have never attempted the whole.

Gem of the Ocean is the first chronologically, set in 1904, though he wrote it ninth. Aunt Ester, who claims to be two hundred and eighty-five years old and appears or is invoked throughout the cycle, washes souls at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and a young man arrives needing his cleaned. Nadia Fall ran Theatre Royal Stratford East for six years and now runs the Young Vic, and the American cycle plays have been thin on British stages for a decade.

Nadia Fall directs the first British staging in twenty years, in the Young Vic’s Main House from Friday 14 May to Saturday 10 July 2027. Eight weeks takes the Main House through the whole of the London Season — a two-and-a-half-hour American play about the generation immediately out of slavery, running through Ascot and Wimbledon.