Sweat review – chilling vision of a divided, alienated America

Although principally set in 2000, Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning 2015 play anticipated Donald Trump’s presidency with its portrayal of a divided, frustrated and disfranchised community in the deindustrialising city of Reading, Pennsylvania. With Trump campaigning for a second term, the Royal Exchange’s revival is timely. Jade Lewis’s production ultimately presents a chilling vision of how job insecurity can destroy one’s sense of self and lead to the poisonous othering stoked by Trump.

The stage design by Good Teeth studio has huge slabs suspended from the rafters, powerfully suggesting an industrial landscape hoisted away overnight. This in effect is what happens to the play’s steelworkers who, amid a dispute with management over pay cuts, are locked out of their plant, with their machines and jobs destined for Mexico as a result of the contentious North American Free Trade Agreement whose renegotiation was a Trump campaign pledge.

This conflict is heightened by a familial dimension akin to Human Resources, the 1999 film by the late Laurent Cantet in which a management trainee is embroiled in job cuts that affect his father on the shop floor. Nottage’s play centres on African American Cynthia (Carla Henry) who works at the factory with her son Chris (Abdul Sessay) and has finally crossed the floor to become a supervisor only to encounter resentment, some of it racially fuelled, from her friends. Suspicious of her new colleagues (“I wonder if they gave me this job on purpose. Pin a target on me”), Cynthia is also alienated by her former neighbours at the machines.

Similarly targeted is Colombian American Oscar (Marcello Cruz) who works at the local bar and crosses the picket line to pick up factory shifts. He is labelled a