People get hurt

It’s not giving anything away to say that Lynn Nottage‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, currently receiving its British premiere at the Donmar Warehouse, basically involves two hours of watching people get crushed. Inspired by interviews Nottage conducted with steelworkers in Reading, PA – one of the poorest cities of its size in the USA – Sweat moves back and forth between 2000 and 2008, using the disintegrating friendship between two blue-collar women as the lens through which to examine the social and economic consequences of the collapse of manufacturing industry in the rust belt.

Sweat, it’s fair to say, is not exactly a laugh-a-line. In 2000, the two friends – Tracey and Cynthia – both apply for the same promotion to management. Tracey is white, Cynthia is black, and when Cynthia gets the promotion it germinates a seed of jealousy in Tracey that manifests itself in the idea that Cynthia was promoted to fulfil a diversity quota. In 2008, we see two young men – again, one white and one black – struggling after their release from prison for an (at that point) unspecified act of violence. It doesn’t take long to join the dots – everything is connected, and for most of the play you’ll be at least twenty minutes ahead of the plot, but that’s (much) less important than you’d think: Sweat is less about the events themselves and more about reactions and connections, and about what happens to people when they’re kicked to the bottom of the economic chain. Nottage cleverly uses a set of character studies to show the creeping growth of the resentments that fed Trump’s campaign in the 2016 Presidential election (and, as a programme note reminds us, the austerity-driven resentments that drove the Brexit vote are hardly dissimilar). It’s a bleak, bleak picture, but it’s also compelling. Tracey and Cynthia, when we meet them, are believable, likeable, hard-working women; we can more or less see what’s going to happen to them a full act before it actually happens, and that isn’t an accident. Rather, it’s part of the play’s method: we all watched the economic firestorm that underpins the events of Sweat play out on the news, and by making us root for people whose lives are about to be blown apart, and then – in some cases – recoil as their previously likeable natures begin to curdle, Nottage drives home the absolute, slow-motion horror of the way so many lives were ruined by the gradual gutting of the US’s manufacturing industries.

And this, in nearly every respect, is an absolutely flawless production. The play benefits from a space like the Donmar where even the cheapest seats (and yes, I was in the very cheapest seats) are extremely close to the stage; even from the back of the circle, you can see the whites of the actors’ eyes. As Tracey and Cynthia, Martha Plimpton and Clare Perkins are absolutely riveting, and they’re all the more moving because neither they nor Nottage ever asks for the audience’s sympathy. There’s superb work, too, from Patrick Gibson and Osy Ikhile as their grown-up sons, from Sebastian Viveros as a Colombian-American busboy at the bar where Tracey and Cynthia hang out, and especially from Stuart McQuarrie as a barman (and longtime friend of both protagonists) who sees the economic cataclysm coming and is powerless to stop it.

The one wrinkle is Frankie Bradshaw’s set – a blue-collar bar (where nearly all of the scenes set in 2000 take place) surrounded by iron girders in what seems to be a derelict industrial space. It’s a perfectly appropriate environment for the play, but unfortunately Bradshaw seems to subscribe to the Fuck The Audience school of theatrical design: there’s a floor-to-ceiling girder on one side of the stage, it isn’t a part of the Donmar’s building and it doesn’t appear to be supporting any part of the grid structure suspended above the stage, and it’s a significant visual obstruction for probably a quarter of the audience, depending on precisely where the actors are on the stage at a given moment – and that’s even taking into account that the view from cheaper seats is obviously going to be less optimal than the view from the most expensive ones. The obstruction presented by this girder, in fact, would cut across the view from seats in all four price categories at some point during the performance; it’s not a huge obstruction, but it’s not necessary either, and a less arrogant designer could easily have provided a suitably bleak post-industrial landscape in which a significant chunk of the audience weren’t forced to keep craning their necks to see around an entirely ornamental pillar.

With that one exception, this is an outstanding production: a grim but gripping script, beautifully detailed performances from everybody in the ensemble, chillingly naturalistic fight choreography by Kate Waters, appropriately crepuscular lighting by Oliver Fenwick, and – above all – sure-footed, carefully-paced direction by Lynette Linton, who keeps the play moving forward on a slow-burning, gradually rising line of simmering tension. The explosion, when it comes, is genuinely shocking; despite the (considerable) strength of the writing, that’s in no small part because Linton has orchestrated the two hours leading up to that moment with such careful precision. This is probably as good as contemporary American writing gets; I realise that a bald description makes the play sound like a theatrical dose of cod liver oil, but this is a genuinely thrilling piece of theatre – even if, as I did, you find yourself spending most of the performance trying to peer around a girder because the set designer decided caring about sightlines was beneath her.