Review Roundup: See What Critics Had to Say About SWEAT at the Donmar

The Donmar Warehouse presents Lynette Linton's production of Sweat by Lynn Nottage. Casting includes Leanne Best, Patrick Gibson, Osy Ikhile, Wil Johnson, Stuart McQuarrie, Clare Perkins, Martha Plimpton, Sule Rimi and Sebastian Viveros.

In 2011, Lynn Nottage began spending time with the people of Reading, Pennsylvania: officially one of the poorest cities in the USA.

During the following two years, she dug deep into the forgotten heart of middle America, finding a city divided by racial tension and the collapse of industry.

Sweat is the Pulitzer Prize-winning play that Lynn Nottage wrote following her experience.

Her tale of friends pitted against each other by big business and the decline of the American Dream receives its UK premiere at the Donmar, directed by former Donmar Resident Assistant Director Lynette Linton.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Charlie Wilks, BroadwayWorld: There isn't a minute that goes by where you aren't enthralled. Lynette Linton's direction is superb and draws out fantastic performances from each company member. Her production is pitched perfectly in tone, and effortlessly flits between humour, heartbreak and trauma. It's gorgeous storytelling.

Fiona Mountford, The Evening Standard: This might be set in the so-called American 'rustbelt' but, goodness, how it speaks so powerfully to our Brexit-riven, food bank-strewn country, frightened as we are of the future, the 'other' and the decline of social structures we have always taken for granted. Reading's particular problems lie with the encroachment of automation and collapse of industry, in a fierce place that used to guarantee blue collar jobs for life, 'in the mill' and 'in the plant', straight out of high school.

Michael Billington, The Guardian: What Nottage captures brilliantly is the way work, however hard or demanding, gives people an identity and purpose. Tracey, who comes from a family of German craftsmen, is a militant unionist but bereft without employment. "Do you know what it's like," she asks, "to get up and have no place to go?" For the equally tough Cynthia, work is a means of advancement and her union card is a symbol of racial acceptance. Behind the play's portrayal of the damage done to individual lives by what Nottage calls "the American de-industrial revolution" lies a wider picture of collapsing hopes and corporate ruthlessness.

Natasha Tripney, The Stage: The play is brilliant at digging into the areas where race and class intersect. Nottage shows the toll that such physical work takes on their bodies, and the way they use booze to alleviate their fears of what the future might bring - how will they survive if they're laid off?

Andrzej Lukowski, TimeOut: I was a little apprehensive that Nottage's extensive research would lead to information overload. But not a bit of it: there are only nine characters, some of them peripheral, but they're exceptionally well written. Empathy radiates from every word; Nottage's own sweat has paid off in what is emphatically one of the great American plays.

Matt Wolf, The Arts Desk: A tremendous year for American theatre on the London stage is resoundingly capped by Sweat, the Lynn Nottage Pulitzer prize-winner that folds the personal and the political into a collective requiem for a riven country. But the wounding if sometimes-overexplicit writing wouldn't amount to what is yet another feather in the Donmar's 2018 cap without an astonishing directing debut at that address of Lynette Linton, who is shortly to take the reins at the Bush. Between Lynton, designer Frankie Bradshaw, and the ensemble cast of one's dreams, Nottage's portrait of a land in divisive freefall could not seem more complete.

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

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