In 2007, Michael Attenborough directed its European premiere at the Almeida Theatre, and commissioned their resident playwright Roy Williams to write Out of the Fog, a modern look and comparison of contemporary blacks in England versus those in the 1920s in Chicago.

When Ward was seven years old, he wrote a short play and showed it to his father, who threw it in a fire and said it was "the work of the devil".

In my bewilderment that late afternoon, it suddenly occurred to me that we as a people were engulfed by a pack of lies, surrounded, in fact, by one big white fog through which we could see no light anywhere.

Their situation slowly spirals downward, with Lester losing his scholarship because he is black, and when the Great Depression hits, the family faces eviction.

[4]: 143 In 1940 Ward joined Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Theodore Browne, Richard Wright and Alain Locke to form the Negro Playwrights Company in New York.

[2] Around the time of the Almeida Theatre's European premiere of the play, they commissioned their resident playwright Roy Williams to write Out of the Fog, a modern look and comparison of contemporary blacks in England versus those in the 1920s in Chicago.

"[4]: 143 Reviewing the 1940 production for The New Masses, Ralph Ellison wrote that "Big White Fog is like no other Negro play.

The author takes a movement which has been passed off as a ludicrous effort by Negroes to ape British royalty and reveals in it that dignity of human groping which is characteristic of all oppressed peoples.

"[5]: 284 Big White Fog has been compared by Michael Billington of The Guardian to the 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, and the 1930s drama work of Clifford Odets in terms of relating personal and social issues.