August Wilson's Seven Guitars

Seven Guitars opens just after the funeral of Floyd Barton, a blues guitarist whose one hit record came and went, then turns back a week to show how he got there. Friends gather in a shared backyard, drink, argue and remember, and the week plays itself out in front of us.

Floyd is out of jail and certain a recording contract is waiting if he can only reach it: the right guitar, the right money, the right woman willing to come with him. Vera, who has been left behind once already, is not persuaded. Around them a handful of neighbours carry their own unfinished business, among them a drummer, a harmonica player, a landlady, a young woman newly arrived, and Hedley, who keeps chickens and believes something large is owed to him.

August Wilson wrote it as the 1940s entry in his ten-play cycle charting Black life decade by decade across the twentieth century. It reached the stage in the mid-1990s after a long and contested development, and it drew a string of major award nominations. Wilson later returned to one of its characters in a play set forty years on.

The talk is the event. Wilson writes speech that runs like music, full of boasting, teasing and testifying, and the play keeps stopping so that someone can tell a story which turns out to matter. Blues threads through it, sometimes played, more often implied. The comedy is broad, and the dread underneath it never quite lifts.

Seven Guitars is for anyone who wants to hear great writing spoken well, and for anyone who has watched talent go unrewarded and wondered where the fault lies. It is funny, and then it is not, and the turn arrives without warning.