Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Five stars
Sparks fly on the factory floor at the start of Joanna Bowman’s explosive revival of Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, first seen in 2015, but looking more pertinent than ever. As a portent of things to come, this opening image is as telling as the fact that the sides of Francis O’Connor’s set look like a cage, inside which, some kind of combat takes place. This is how it is, not just in the factory, but in the bar where the workers splash their wages around, and almost certainly in the prison the two young men at the heart of the play have just been released from.
The time moves between the turn of the century when it felt like people could get by, to eight years later when the world has changed. The place is Reading, Pennsylvania, a blue-collar heartland fired by iron and steel. Here, Tracey, Cynthia and Jessie spend their down time getting hammered, as do Tracey’s son Jason and Cynthia’s boy Chris. There may be tensions with Cynthia’s strung out ex Brucie, but everyone works the line and has money in their pockets, albeit not for long. When the company who run the factory begin a campaign of cost cutting just as Cynthia gets promoted, the long-term fallout has life changing consequences for all.
Nottage’s play is a note perfect dramatic dissection of how big business has broken working class communities for decades, starving them of jobs, dividing them on racial grounds and provoking conflict that sometimes ends in tragedy. It may be set in Pennsylvania, but it could so easily be a town in 1980s Yorkshire during the Miners Strike. Either that or the 1970 textile factory of Colin Welland’s 1975 TV play, Leeds United! or even the 1981 Greenock factory sit-in depicted in Frances Poet’s just produced new play, Stand & Deliver. That the situation Nottage’s play depicts is set so relatively recently is damning evidence of how little has changed in whatever might be left of heavy industry. The platitudes of assorted American presidents who flicker onto the bar’s TV screen confirm it.
All nine actors on stage embody the play’s world with magnificently controlled fury as each character looks for a way out, only to end up attacking each other after becoming even more trapped. This is the case from the initially carefree blousiness of Lucianne McEvoy’s Tracey, Debbie Korley’s Cynthia and Laura Cairns as Jessie, to Rudolphe Mdlongwa as Chris and Lewis MacDougall as an increasingly feral Jason. Christopher Middleton’s bar manager Stan has already given up on fighting the system, while Mark Theodore’s Brucie is one of its casualties. This is something Manuel Pacific’s barman Oscar is aiming to avoid, but only ends up a social pariah. After all that’s gone before, it is left to Ako Mitchell’s parole officer Evan to pick up the pieces.
Produced by the Citizens Theatre with the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, Bowman’s production is punctuated by little bursts of techno music care of composer Patricia Panther. Heather Scott’s video mash ups stutter into view as history unfolds, both onscreen at a global level as well as much closer to home.
As Chris and Jason enter a not so brave new world in the play’s final scene, their closing lines show what is necessary for some kind of collective survival, as Nottage humanises things with devastating detail in a mighty rendering of an epic tragedy for our times.
The Herald, May 8th 2026
ends
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