Scorching U.S. play inspired by our pit strikes
American play Sweat, about blue collar workers fighting for their livelihoods in Pennsylvania, has its roots in our own miners’ strike.
Lynn nottage made multiple visits to reading — officially one of america’s most impoverished districts — when researching her play.
But the dramatist, who won a Pulitzer prize for Sweat, which played at the Donmar and transfers to the Gielgud from June 7, told me the play’s genesis goes all the way back to the British miners’ strike.
She was an exchange student here in 1984 and travelled to mansfield at the height of the dispute. ‘no one was working,’ she recalled. ‘i played snooker and went to the bar. it was interesting being there and seeing men not working. i saw it in a very visceral way and i like to think that some of it is embedded in Sweat.’
She stayed in a house close
to a pit. ‘ my staying there was a way of them making money, because, of course, i paid to stay.’
When i first saw Sweat at the Public Theater in new York i was struck by how easily it could have been set in any one of the UK’s industrial heartlands.
i had the same sense when i saw it again on Broadway; and even more so when it played the Donmar directed by Lynette Linton, with a cast that included martha Plimpton, clare Perkins and Leanne Best. ‘mansfield bled into the work,’ nottage agreed, saying it ‘is in the Dna of the piece’.
She said the play could be adapted for england. it has been done in Japan, is being translated into Spanish and French and she’s even been asked by an iranian translator if it could be performed in Farsi.
The scorching work charts the disintegration of the characters played by the aforementioned actresses. They work at a steel mill where there’s talk of skilled workers being replaced by labourers from Latin america. There’s an almighty clash of class and race.
nottage sets her play between 2000 and 2008. During her repeated trips to reading, she chatted with the men and women who were in the process of losing their jobs.
There were caucasians and african-americans. Some of the white workers were surprised that she, a black woman, would be interested in their lives. But nottage wanted to understand how they lived — and how they survived. ‘i have enormous empathy for all of the folks,’ she said.
But their jobs are never coming back. ‘coal is gone,’ she said. ‘Steel is gone.
‘What i don’t understand is why more people aren’t trying to figure out what the next iteration of the industrial revolution is — and where all the working people who are not necessarily educated are going to go.’
Some
have become a form of walking dead, she said, hooked on opioids ‘ because people need to numb the pain and it’s not just physical pain. it’s psychological. The drugs are a form of escape.’
Donald Trump connected with those workers; UKiP has cornered them here. ‘circumstances force them to do bad things. White panic is breeding something very dark and very ugly,’ nottage said.
For all of that, Sweat is a beautiful piece of theatrical art; a play all must see.
nottage, the Donmar and other producers have ensured there will be 350 seats per performance at the Gielgud for £25 or less.
We’ll hear more of nottage next year when her mlima’s Tale, the heartbreaking story of an elephant stalked by ivory poachers, runs at the Kiln Theatre, with indhu rubasingham directing.