“Sweat”, Citizens Theatre
Mark Brown in Glasgow
★★★★★
11 May 2026
This staging of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Sweat (which is co-produced by the Citizens Theatre and the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh) suggests a turn towards the work play within Scottish theatre (coming, as it does, soon after the premiere of Frances Poet’s play-with-songs Stand & Deliver, which is an account of the sit-in by the almost entirely female workforce of the Lee Jeans factory in Greenock in 1981).
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic.
By contrast with Poet’s piece (which is based upon real events), Nottage’s drama is a fiction that explores the complex, often toxic impacts of powerful economic and social forces upon a group of workers at Olstead, an imagined textile factory in Reading, Pennsylvania. Shifting back and forth between the years 2008 and 2000, the play opens with an understandably tense meeting between Black probation officer Evan (Ako Mitchell) and young, white convict Jason (Lewis MacDougall), whose face is marked with numerous neo-Nazi symbols.
Thus, at the very outset, the play plunges us into the pernicious racial politics that have always informed and disfigured class conflict in the United States. As soon becomes clear through the drama’s shifts in chronology, there was nothing inevitable back in the year 2000 about Jason’s descent into fascistic white supremacism.
Back then – like his mother Tracey (Lucianne McEvoy) and her workmates and friends at the bar run by former factory worker Stan (Christopher Middleton) – his social circle comprised Black and white workers from the Olstead plant. The play traces the cataclysms in the lives of both generations of workers as the profit motive supersedes any sense of gratitude or loyalty towards the Reading workforce on the part of Olstead’s management.
It is a bleak irony that this production opened in Glasgow just as the Wall Street Journal was reporting on a remarkably similar real life scenario unfolding in New Britain, Connecticut. There, the giant tool making company Stanley Black and Decker announced the closure of its New Britain plant in favour of production in the Far East.
Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic.
There are, in all of this, powerful echoes of John Sayles’s extraordinary 1987 film Matewan, which dramatizes the true story of a bitter and bloody industrial dispute in a mining town in West Virginia in 1920. It speaks both to the brilliance of Nottage’s writing and the continuities in US industrial relations over more than a century that Sweat manages to evoke the history of the American labour movement while also being so very timely.
Nottage’s skill does not lie only in her ability to draw compelling and believable working-class characters (not least in the humour and loyalty of their friendships). Nor does it reside purely in her brilliant grasp of the economic powers that affect them (almost as Ancient Greek gods meddle in the lives of mortals).
Perhaps the play’s strongest suit – in dramatic terms – is its grasp of structure. In beginning towards the end, and unfurling her narrative through cuts back and forward, Nottage is able to set out her stall in reverberating theatrical terms that, one suspects, Bertolt Brecht himself would have applauded.
From its superb casting to its evocative design (the factory, the bar and other locations conjured up by Francis O’Connor), director Joanna Bowman’s production is – as the marvellous script demands – simultaneously insightful and blisteringly visceral.
Intriguingly, Nottage’s opus emerged some six years into the Obama presidency (implying, perhaps, that the Democratic Party wasn’t delivering for working people as it had promised to do). In 2026 – with federal immigration forces attempting to occupy many working-class neighbourhoods in the US and factory closures, such as in Connecticut, blighting the lives of American workers – Sweat looks like an indictment of President Trump’s promises to the industrial workforce of the USA.
At the Citizens Theatre until 16 May; transferring to the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, 27 May – 13 June
