When in 2015 Lynn Nottage’s seminal play, Sweat, dramatised the corrosive effects of de-industralisation on blue-collar lives in rust-belt America, it looked like the future of Trumpian politics foretold.
There is a terrible circular synergy between that moment of event theatre and this one in the staging of Dominique Morisseau’s Tony award-winning drama. It features a quartet of stressed out assembly-line workers in a car factory in 2008, but feels resonant as Trump stands on the brink of re-election.
Its UK premiere is in the same theatre, too, and it reverberates with similar force, although now we are not in Pennsylvania but a Detroit that is being hollowed out by the global financial crisis.
Set in the factory’s break room and showing characters only between shifts, the spectre of closure looms over their lives, though each deals with it differently. Indomitable matriarch Faye (Pamela Nomvete, superb), is uncowed; supervisor Reggie (Tobi Bamtefa), wants to do good by her; whippet smart Shanita (Racheal Ofori), is pregnant and determined to hold on to the hope of a bright future and Dez (Branden Cook), begins playfully but is turned desperate by the dead-ends he meets in trying to forge a path ahead.
This group is America’s precariat, on the brink of joining the underclass at any moment. What is striking is their resourcefulness and grit in the face of crisis. They are as close as a dysfunctional family and drawn to be likable, but with no sentimentality. Reggie’s loyalty above his own welfare might seem more symbolic than entirely convincing but it does not feel irresponsibly optimistic either.
Directed by Matthew Xia, it is dynamic staged with a highly infectious soundtrack (from Aretha Franklin to hip-hop artist, J Dilla, and his group, Slum Village), while the pound and hiss of machinery fills the space overhead in Ultz’s realist stage design.
The production itself thrums with life, its tone buoyant, refusing to sink into defeatism. Conventionally structured and conversational, it avoids stasis through the pop and bubble of Morisseau’s script, which is a joy to listen to, line for line (the sound of an ancient car engine is like “an old woman with emphysema”; the toxic effect of “inhaling” workplace rumour “clogs up your lungs”).
Its bigger intrigues come in an emotionally intense second act as characters go from sparring to confiding, but avoids melodrama.
As a play, it is about individual resilience in the face of systematised dispossession. The question of where that might leave these characters, and America itself, lingers.
• At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 24 August
