• Sweat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), West End

This searing 2015 work by Lynn Nottage, making its London premiere, is an extraordinarily powerful portrait of the devastation wrought by globalization, represented here by NAFTA, on small-town America. It opens (and closes) wearily with an unnecessary framework of two former friends speaking separately with a parole officer, making me think we were in for a didactic all-talk-no-show show. But it quickly gets into gear once the drama proper gets going and never looks back.

The story centers primarily on three female workers from a factory in a Rust Belt town who hang out in the neighborhood bar. The factory has employed their families for generations in what is effectively a lifetime job and has became the backbone of their tight community. But when invisible forces come to threaten their livelihoods, the assumptions that have held them together begin to fray. It shows how race and ethnicity issues can arise from despair: the promotion of a black worker over her white colleague prompts the latter to notice race for first time on the suspicion that political correctness has given her rival an undue boost, while the willingness of a locally born bar worker of Hispanic heritage to cross the factory picket line and accept a lower wage brings emotions to a boil.

One UK newspaper called the play a “masterpiece of pro-Trump propaganda”, but in fact the show, which debuted in New York well before the 2016 election, is simply an unflinchingly realistic picture of the way it is, based on over two years of interviews by the author with residents of the former industrial town of Reading, Pennsylvania. I’m sure Nottage was horrified that the implicit criticism of NAFTA was shared by Trump, who wasn’t on the political radar at the time. The play suggests that the situation was caused by conscious choices by politicians, with videos of Bush shown repeatedly, and that may be true to an extent. But it came amid a confident conviction on all sides in the long-term benefits of free and open trade regardless of the consequences for individual households (NAFTA itself was a bipartisan effort that passed under the Clinton administration), and the global wave, once begun, became an unstoppable force. The results are effectively the outcome of the increasingly impersonal money-centered business ethic portrayed in The Lehman Trilogy.

The haunting ending showing the fate of the barman was one of most powerful moments I’ve ever had in theater. The show implies strongly that policies like affirmative action and uncontrolled immigration go against the common man’s sense of fairness and conversely heighten awareness of our differences, encouraging jealousy and separation. It is easy to label the victims “racist” or such, but the play demonstrates convincingly that things are not so black-and-white (so to speak). I recalled a Facebook post by a friend with a comfy Canadian government job in the climate change field that insisted, “Immigration is good for the macroeconomy – the losers are uneducated workers who see their wages fall, but overall it creates a macro boost.” The results of that attitude are crystal clear here.

Nottage’s dialogue was spot on, and the situation was slice-of-life, directed to naturalistic perfection by Lynette Linton. A fiery Martha Plimpton (the only American in the cast) and Clare Perkins were superb as colleagues, friends and ultimately rivals, while Stuart McQuarrie was the solid core of the show as the neutral barman who used to work in the plant. Terrific work by all. And again flawless American accents – London seems to have reached perfection on that score, at least in straight plays.

Whether the profound social changes examined in the show are reversible is up in the air, but it raises vital questions about the most basic assumptions of the past few years. The Lehman Trilogy showed how capitalism slowly but steadily ground down the moral sense of the nation’s financial elite, and Sweat spotlights those who paid (and are paying) the price. Sweat, like Lehman, is a disturbing and indispensable work.