Sweat at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre – review

At first, Sweat feels like a play out of place. After all, it’s a very American story that’s being staged at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre (in a co-production with Edinburgh’s Lyceum), telling the story of a fading rust belt town where Olstead’s steel mill, the city’s main employer, is on its last legs. What’s a story as local as that doing on a Scottish stage?

Before long, however, you sense that there’s something more universal going on, something deeper than just an evocation of a time and place. As the group of workers stand around and chew the fat in the local bar, there’s a recurring theme of lost potential and encroaching regret. Cynthia looks forward to a cruise through the Panama Canal that she knows she’ll never take, Jessie looks back on dreams of a world tour that slipped through her fingers decades ago, and young Chris looks forward to a college education that in the end he never gets to receive. In one of the most poignant lines in the play, Jessie shares her “regret that for a while there was possibility”, and when her co-workers complain that there’s no longer a reward for hard work, suddenly the story feels very current, very political, and much closer to home.

It’s a testament to Lynn Nottage’s script, which premiered off-Broadway in 2016, that it carries its resonances so powerfully and explores its issues in a way that doesn’t feel strained. In fact, it is crafted both skilfully and traditionally. There’s a framing device where some characters in 2008 are looking back on events in 2000, but otherwise the story unfolds in a steady, forward-moving narrative, built around a foreshadowed denouement in a way that wouldn’t feel amiss in a play by O’Neill or Miller. The dialogue feels real, and the characters fully drawn.

Only occasionally do you sense a pile-up of issues that comes perilously close to ticking boxes. Employment, racism, opioid addiction, alcoholism, globalisation… I could go on, and some of these topics feel uncomfortably tacked-on.

Nevertheless, what’s there carries power, and it’s brought to life by a passionate ensemble cast. As the older factory workers, Laura Cairns and Lucianne McEvoy radiate wounded dignity at what their employer is trying to do to them, while Debbie Korley encapsulates successfully the dilemma of the worker who becomes a supervisor, caught in the eye of the storm as the waters rise. Lewis MacDougall and Rudolph Mdlongwa are full of frustrated energy as the younger workers who look back with remorse on the turn their lives have taken, and Christopher Middleton evokes sympathy as the barman trying to hold the crumbling community together. The cast of British actors do first-rate American accents, which sounds like a given but counts for a lot.

Their interactions are handled expertly by director Joanna Bowman, and she’s helped by Francis O’Connor’s fluid but realistic set designs. The opening tableau in the steel mill is one of the most effective mise-en-scènes that I’ve seen in a long time.

So while Sweat is very much grounded in its time and place, it undeniably has something to say to us here and now, too, and it serves as a reminder of drama’s ability to speak to the passions and dilemmas that human beings share wherever they are.