Sweat review – sociological snapshot doesn’t always make for compelling drama

Deborah Galanos, Lisa McCune, James Fraser, Tinashe Mangwana and Paula Arundell in Sweat. ‘The show’s greatest asset is Arundell, who is, as almost always, an electrifying presence.’ Photograph: Prudence Upton

Probably by luck rather than design, three Pulitzer-winning dramas have opened in Sydney in one week. At Belvoir, there’s Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County; at the Seymour Centre, Matthew Lopéz’s seven-hour epic, The Inheritance; and, in the Wharf theatre, a play that, according to the Wall Street Journal, “explains Trump’s win” in 2016.

Written by the African American playwright Lynn Nottage, Sweat is set in Reading, Pennsylvania (one of those swing-state electoral districts we were so closely watching a couple of weeks ago). The vast majority of the action takes place in a bar that has for decades been the social hub for workers from a steel-tube plant. It’s a place where everybody knows your name – and where everybody knows your goddamn business, whether you like it or not.