SWEAT
Royal Exchange Manchester

WHAT happens to a working-class community when the major industrial employer shuts up shop? The answer is a lot and it’s not good. Lives fall apart and once-solid friendships fray, scapegoats are sought.

All this is devastatingly explored by Lynn Nottage in her Pulitzer prize-winning play SWEAT. A working-class community built around the steelworks in Reading, Pennsylvania, is shattered as the cloud of poverty hangs over them following the outsourcing of their jobs.

The play is set over two time periods, 2000 and 2008, against a backdrop of a financial crisis caused by the US government ploughing money into the failing banks. Steelworkers gather after 10 hours’ backbreaking work in the local bar to relax.

Over the eight years we see the erosion of their lives as the speed of industrial decline accelerates.

The play examines the impact of deindustrialisation on the community’s life, where petty squabbles between friends become ravines, racism is the easy weapon to blame others for their misery.

SWEAT is an amazing and hugely important play. Nottage understands the political system that strives for profit by keeping workers tightly controlled. A system that will use any mechanism in the drive for cheaper labour. She shows how a close community can become ruptured as worker is pitted against worker, black against white, both against Latino. It is all horribly real.

The Royal Exchange’s staging is both engrossing and thought-provoking. Jade Lewis’s fine direction captures the turmoil in people’s lives while at the same time giving us a community full of humour and character.

In addition to the sublime writing, the brilliance of this production is due to the amazing acting from the fantastic ensemble cast.

Two of Manchester’s finest female actors, Carla Henry and Pooky Quesnel, take on the central roles of Cynthia and Tracey. Life-long friends who unravel as anger, envy, jealousy and racism take over their lives.

Jonathan Kerrigan gives a beautifully heartbreaking performance as Stan, an injured steelworker-turned-bartender. He’s constantly choreographing the interaction between fractious friends while trying to understand all viewpoints. Inevitably this leads to devastating consequences.

Lewis Gribben and Abdul Sessay are outstanding as the two young friends surviving eight years incarcerated in the US prison system, only to emerge in time to see their future hopes and aspirations stolen by corporate greed.

A mention too to Kaitlin Howard’s fight direction for creating a vicious bar brawl which had many in the audience wincing and looking away.

This is a play that understands global capitalism and, although set in Pennsylvania, it could be set anywhere. The impact of capitalism’s drive to maximise profit at the expense of humanity is universal.

This is a must-see production.

Runs until May 25 2024. Box office: royalexchange.co.uk.