It’s an apt a metaphor for family dysfunction – for example, how many other children get to hide away in a casket for fun and perform numbers on it as if they were the Jackson 5? Weird surroundings result in weird behaviour.

Adapted from the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel and with superb live musical accompaniment, this is a very shrewd choice of show to stage.

Each family may be unhappy in its way own as Tolstoy says, but the Bechdels are uniquely unhappy. A father who flies into unexplained rages at his wife and children, a mother in denial about her daughter coming out as a lesbian, and a couple unwilling to admit a dark truth in small town Pennsylvania set the stage for a night of high emotion.

If all this sounds wearying, it’s not; the opposite in fact. It is in turns affecting, moving, tragic, funny and wise. To cope with family dynamics, little Alison (Harriet O’Shea) withdraws into television and drawing – her life story growing up is wittily witnessed in captions throughout the show, so that you can almost feel her walking off the pages of a graphic novel.

Her relationship with her father Bruce (brilliantly played by Nigel Harman) is alternately adoring and intensely frustrating. When she goes to college he sends her books, including by Colette. It is only her knowing college girlfriend Joan (Natasha Cottrial) who realises Bruce – himself hiding in plain sight as gay – is trying to tell her something about her sexuality. The adult Alison, played by Alice Audrey O’Hanlon with such winning insouciance that at times she resembles Dougal in Father Ted in her level of innocence about everyday affairs, only belatedly comes to understand her father’s psychological struggles, by which point it is too late.

The musical numbers in the show are sharp and powerful and brim along with zest, scooping up the audience in their enthusiasm. The fine ensemble acting adds to the show’s strong production and while there is a gnawing sense of claustrophobia in the unravelling of events, the dark never quite shades out the light.

Jodie McNee as Alison the graphic novelist is a continuous presence on stage, acting as both chorus and internal monologue for her younger selves, moving around the other actors with wonderment and pity in equal measure. Taking solace from family misfortune in drawing helps Alison process difficult truths in a way everyone will be able relate to.

The Royal Exchange may well have a smash summer hit on its hands.

Fun Home is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 3 July to 1 August 2026.

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Rory Mullarkey explores what it means to be a Mancunian past and present in his panoramic survey of who we are, our roots and the 1996 IRA bomb which became the turning point for Manchester to reinvent itself.

The play opens in Angel Meadow on St Michael’s Flags in the 19^th century, with Irishwoman Annie Donovan swearing to revenge death on the person who killed her pig – also called Annie. Played by Elaine Cassidy with bulldozer energy, Annie strides across filth-ridden Angel Meadow and its salubrious characters without so much as a look-back. Everyone in the city is caught up in the grimy swirl of the industrial revolution, none more so than the Irish immigrant population filling up Manchester’s underclass.

Mullarkey then swiftly transposes us to 1996 and a sweltering hot day in June. Market Street is awash with the usual baggage of shoppers and characters flit on and off the stage, some in less than a few seconds. Some roller skate, some push prams, some stroll uncertainly after one too many. But they all make up the fabric of this indomitable city.

We are given vignettes of city centre life on that fateful Saturday: a husband and wife shop for clothes; a young boy undergoes a viola exam at Chethams; people queue to make phone calls from a BT box (remember them?); bored teenagers hang around looking moody.

This tableau of life is narrated by Jenny (Katherine Pearce) as the mood suddenly turns darker: a police cordon is put in place, Corporation Street is inaccessible, no one knows what’s going on as the heat only intensifies. Until, that is, an earth-shattering boom rings out and clouds of dust rain down on everyone. In one unforgettable moment a pregnant woman is lifted 10 feet in the air after taking the full force of the bomb blast. It is a moment of shock and silence in the theatre.

The production is funny and fast-paced. A runner down the centre of the stage ingeniously allows for dining tables and cars to be propelled across it, and at one stage a woman traverses the stage in nothing more than a swimsuit. A huge community cast adds to the authenticity of the production.

The play ends on a sombre note, with Cassidy and Pearce inhabiting two characters who chance upon in each other in Angel Meadow Park in the present day. Anti-Irish sentiment and the conversion of the city from the site of industrial warehouses to plush residential warehouse lettings gradually give way to a moving meditation on the tragedy of loss – and survival.

The production brilliantly captures the madcap spirit of Manchester and its refusal to kowtow to bombs, bigotry or bombast.

The world premiere of Even These Things is at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 15 May to 15 June 2026.

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Noel Coward pours a lot into his dramatic soup and right from the start the ingredients are on display for a feast of drama: unrequited love, settling for second best in a relationship, choosing domesticity over passion, and just what is the correct attitude to adopt towards life. If the play feels dated, it can still be held up to the light through such universal themes.

With sharp direction by Blanche McIntyre and a set which continuously revolves – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – to give a distorting sense of time passing, the play reminds us that if we seek happiness in desire we will ultimately be disappointed. Jill Halfpenny (Waterloo Road, EastEnders) gives us an Amanda fatally attracted by past love Elyot and hoping that second time round they can recreate the passion which first brought them together, even at the cost of abandoning their respective partners. Halfpenny turns in a fiery performance as a woman determined to make her own choices, wrong or otherwise. When she launches herself at the beastly Elyot it is a moment of unalloyed drama.

But it is Steve John Shepherd – complete with bolt-on hairpiece – who steals the show with his louche portrayal of Elyot, all James Mason drawl and whispering cigarette smoke. He is maddening and is meant to be. His advice is to laugh at life and hope it doesn’t laugh back in your face – down with the moralists and up with irony because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Elyot appears effete on the surface but Shepherd shows him to be full of bubbling molten lava inside, ready to explode at any minute. Quite a brilliant performance.

It all makes it very difficult for spurned spouses Shazia Nicholls as Sybil and Daniel Millar as Victor to make their mark. The final scene in which they confront Elyot and Amanda – and in turn vent their deflected spleen on each other – feels histrionic if necessary.  This is due more to the clockwork plotting of Coward than to any actorly deficiency. When Elyot labels Victor a ‘gasbag’ it’s hard to disagree, but Millar lends him the right amount of wounded decency we can all empathise with. Nicholls pits her youth and naivety against the others’ jaded immorality and in doing so reveals Sibyl to be not simply a victim of infidelity but someone who can see it for what it is, human weakness.

Some of the attitudes in the play are antediluvian and come with a warning but there is no denying the power of this production. The one liners come fast and furious and Shepherd is fantastic as Elyot at delivering non-sequiturs which leave you wondering about his state of mind. As Coward shows, to live with someone is to relinquish your private life.

Private Lives is at The Royal Exchange Theatre from 27 March to 2 May 2026.

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The play is also celebrating an anniversary. It is 40 years since audiences were first introduced to the inhabitants of this road in Lancashire described as ‘at the end of the slag heap’. And that is how life feels for these characters in 1986, living at the hard end of Thatcher’s Britain.

The play is written as a series of vignettes, with the audience getting a glimpse inside the houses and the lives of the people behind each door. Aside from the location the one thread holding it together is Scullery, a part which feels like it could have been written for Johnny Vegas.

Scullery acts as a narrator, linking the stories and sometimes drawing us further in by filming actors’ monologues with a hand-held video camera, whose faces are projected onto a series of old, square TVs strewn from the ceiling. He is an amicable drunk, who swigs spirits straight from the bottle and looks like he hasn’t washed in a very long time.

There are many similarities to his rambling stand-up character as he breaks the third wall and talks to the audience, acknowledging them as visitors to his street for the night.
There is real potential for more energy in the banter here, something Vegas usually excels at. Here he appears constrained, perhaps more by the direction than the dialogue. Whatever it is, it is a shame because this play desperately needs to squeeze out every inch of humour as the core of it is so dark and sadly piercingly relevant today. As we watch two young people on stage literally starved of hope and life it feels a bit too close for comfort, when just this week new figures showed huge increases in Britain’s unemployment, with one in 6 young people unable to find a job and many economically inactive due to poor mental health.

Director Selina Cartmell and designer Leslie Travers clearly want us to make these comparisons by turning the play into an immersive and intense experience that starts from the moment you walk in off the street. For 15 minutes before the show and all throughout the interval the actors mingle among the crowd or act out small scenes, for example you might see Lesley Joseph pushing a rickety supermarket trolley full of old junk as one character or selling chips from a stall as another. There is a lot going on, taking up the whole foyer space, the Studio theatre space and the bar areas.

Once inside the module of the seated theatre the mood feels dystopian. Several TVs hang from the ceiling with a myriad of straggling wires. They are used for flashes of nostalgic 80s TV shows like Dukes of Hazard and 3,2,1, as well as magnifiying the emotions of individual actors, and a pre-recorded scene with Sir Tom Courtenay, who performed in the opening production at the theatre half a century ago. It works most of the time, although for those in the first and second gallery there are moments when the action is completely obscured by this hanging set.

The high-calibre cast is no doubt a big draw for this production. Lucy Beaumont and Shobna Gulati are the other two big name castings, although their roles are no more substantial than the other actors in what is effectively an ensemble piece. There are 13 actors on stage, all apart from Vegas playing multiple roles. Hearing chat afterwards this caused confusion for some audience members. Aside from Gulati, who had very distinct changes, the other characters were not as clearly differentiated, leaving some wondering if they were watching the same character in a different setting.

In all it is a difficult watch, but there is much hope to be taken from a full, buzzing audience talking about their experience.

Road is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 13 February to 14 March 2026. Age guidance 14+

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For sisters Christina, Agnes, Rose and Margaret another kind of freedom comes with their treasured radio, when it works that is. They daydream their way through their chores listening to crooners transmitted as if from another world. For this is 1930s Ireland where neighbours and the church provide a corrective morality.

The men are either absent or have been for some time. Wastrel Gerry Evans has fathered a ‘love child’ with Rose and only makes occasional trips back to the family home,  riding in on a promise and talk of jobs he can’t hold down. Uncle Jack is the more complex character, back from missionary work in Africa and bringing with him strange ideas of what it means to live in a land where worship of gods signals freedom rather than restriction.

The brilliance of Friel’s elegiac play lies in capturing the conflict between human desire and the dead hand of convention and adherence to Christian values. Even schoolmistress Kate (Natalie Radmall-Quirke), the main breadwinner in the house and a rod of rectitude, cannot contain herself when the others break into dance in a spontaneous outburst of primeval joy in their kitchen. It is one of the highlights of the evening, a moment when the sisters’ longing for release suddenly erupts into fervid emotion.

Margaret (Siobhan O’Kelly) has only her Woodbines to console during long summer evenings when life is happening elsewhere, Rose (a wonderful performance from Rachel O’Connell) lives off the promise of her beau who takes her out on his boat despite dire warnings from the others. Chris (Martha Dunlea) is trapped by a child and circumstance, while Agnes (Laura Pyper) knits away in a corner making gloves to sell to the neighbours in Ballybeg and fearing the coming of the industrial revolution which will demolish her cottage industry.

But it is Kate and Jack (Frank Laverty) who set the moral parameters of the play. He has been sent home under a cloud and appears at first to be suffering from memory loss, constantly grappling for words beyond his reach. But as he recovers and enchants the sisters with his tales of sacrifice and abandon in the pagan ceremonies in Uganda he now identifies with, Kate tries and fails to bring him back to Christian righteousness. He has witnessed a different way of ordering life and cannot go back.

If there’s a weakness in Friel’s play – given a dynamic production by director Elizabeth Newman – it is the use of the narrator which gets in the way of the drama and is a stagey device at the end where all loose ends are tied up. That aside, this is an exhilarating production of a classic play.

Dancing at Lughnasa is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 10 October to 8 November 2025.

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Manchester playwright Ntombizodwa Nyoni has assembled the main players at the congress for a spirited evocation of that time, along with bitter personal rivalries and love interests. While the fight for independence from colonial rule gained top billing at the congress, simmering underneath were personal vendettas which threatened to undermine the congress’ aims.

At the start of the play, the main protagonists arrive in Manchester for the start of the congress:  Jomo Kenyatta, who would go on to become president of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah, who would go on to lead Ghana, Amy Ashwood-Garvey, the widow of Marcus Garvey, radical communist George Padmore, leader of the international African Service Bureau founded by CLR James, and Joe Appiah, trainee lawyer and future Ghanian statesman.

While they tease, argue and fight each other over political strategies and romantic entanglements, what comes across most strongly in the production is the total commitment to overthrowing not just the British colonial empire but the entire capitalist system which spawned it. Their fierce debates smother any personality clashes.

While the play necessarily contains many political speeches (many no doubt taken from the archives chronicling the congress), there are plenty of moments of lightness and humour in the play. After a day’s politicking, the delegates cannot wait to change their clothes and head into the city for a night of drinking and carousing. Rudolphe Mdlongwe as Makumalo Hlubi struts across the stage like a peacock vowing to “kiss women all night” and has ambitions to be Africa’s finest actor, just waiting for that call from Hollywood.

Eamonn Walker gives a fine performance as congress chair George Padmore who is trying to hold together the various factions to present a united front, while all the time resisting demands from Kwame Nkrumah (Eric Kofi Abrefa) for a chance to take a leading role in the independence movement.

The ghostly presence of W.E.B. Du Bois as the elder statement of the liberation movement haunts proceedings, turning up as he does halfway through the congress to give it his seal of approval.

Moss Side champion boxer and Communist Len Johnson (Tachia Newall) has come to report on proceedings but finds himself drawn into the radical spirit of the time and dreams of becoming an MP “to beat the colour bar”.

This is an uplifting and enriching production about an important part of Manchester and Africa’s history and Nyoni and the strong cast do full justice to the redoubtable aims of the congress and what it would go on to achieve and its lasting legacy.

Liberation is at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 27 June to 26 July as part of the Manchester International Festival 2025.

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More than 45 years on it is being staged again, with Kym Marsh in the lead role as Beverly, a part that will forever be associated with Alison Steadman. It must be a daunting task to take on a role so bound up with another actor in people’s imagination but Marsh does a brilliant job of delivering a Beverly who is entirely her own (albeit with the odd splash of Mrs Merton thrown in for good measure).

The sense of anticipation in the audience before the play starts is palpable and people are eager to greet an old friend to see what they’ve been up to since they last met. The laughs are embedded from the start as Beverly flounces on stage in a dress which screams 1970s suburban sophistication – Nana Mouskouri meets Debenhams, perhaps.

Marsh is never without a drink or a cigarette in hand throughout the play and her facial expressions compete with her lines for the best laughs. She adopts a pitch perfect Mancunian drawl which brings a welcome home touch to this production. If there ever was a star vehicle for an actor it’s this one and Marsh rises to the challenge in giving us a Beverly who is both glorious and pitiable.

Stunning as Marsh’s performance is, she is lucky to be surrounded by great ensemble acting. Graeme Hawley brings a touch of Alan Partridge to the role of downtrodden husband Laurence, whose petit bourgeoise existence is exemplified by his appreciation of reproduction art, love of ‘light’ classical music, and an uneasy sense that the neighbourhood is going downhill. Hawley’s tightly-wound performance is a joy to watch, his simmering explosions finally finding tragic release.

The newcomers Laurence instinctively distrusts, Angela and Tony – or ‘Ange and Tone’ as Beverly calls them – come round for a dinner party, along with fellow neighbour Sue, whose daughter Abigal is hosting the eponymous party. Nurse Ange is played with doey-eyed insouciance by Yasmin Taheri, doting on husband Tony while fearful of his violent outbursts. Beverly lusts after ex-footballer Tony (played with guttural intensity by Kyle Rowe) from the moment she sets her eyes on him. Their fondling dance together is one of the highlights of a show which knows it doesn’t need to play for laughs given the script delivers so much.

The play by Mike Leigh is certainly of its time and it shows in places, but the attitudes of social climbing, childlessness and marital discord ring true as much today as when first aired at the Hampsted Theatre all those years ago. The show is a real treat.

Abigail’s Party is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 4 April to 24 May 2025. Age guidance 14+

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This double-hander from Caryl Churchill goes some way to rectifying the situation. In Escaped Alone, three friends – all retired – sit in the garden on a typically sunny day, enjoying tea and biscuits on the lawn. Annette Badland plays Vi, Maureen Beattie is Mrs Jarrett, Souad Frances is Lena, while Margot Leicester takes the role of interloper Sally.

Their conversation scatters over mundane affairs such as past careers, children and grandchildren, fractured with occasional ill-feeling and resentments naturally gained through long friendship.

Mrs Jarrett, a retired doctor, has a phobia about cats (watch out for the monologue); Lena suffers from agoraphobia – at one point she says she would have loved to visit Japan, only for Mrs Jarrett to respond: ‘Try getting to Tesco first’.

But it is the revelation from hairdresser Vi which causes the biggest stir. We learn early on that she has been ‘away’ for six years, only to discover later why.

Their conversations ramble amiably on until they are interrupted in flash scenes by neighbour Sally with torrid accounts of a apocalyptic near future (man-made or natural we never discover) in which bodies pile up in the streets, people live as troglodytes, and there is such an acute shortage of food that obese people make a living cutting off slices of their fat to sell on.

The moral seems to be that as the world burns and as personal lives implode, somehow – perhaps in a very English way – we carry on with our quotidian lives with tea and cake and trips to the dentist. Why? Because we have to, there is simply no alternative.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and there are some keen – if morbid – jokes throughout to add a touch of levity.

The speech is clipped and barely anyone completes a full sentence, adding to the fragmentary feel of the piece; the play – the longer of the two – ends with a sustained howl from Sally at the futility of existence. Beckett again: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.

If Escaped Alone is fragmentary, the second piece, What If If Only, is decidedly elliptical. A short, sparse play, it features Danielle Henry as a woman whose partner has committed suicide and whom she continues to address in the chair he once inhabited. She is visited both by the future (Annette Badland again) and the present. The script touches upon the necessity to create our own worlds and features an ‘invasion’ of the set by actors from the Royal Exchange Elders, who admonish the woman for the failings of the world, and perhaps our own failure to take action on such important issues as war, domestic violence and climate change.

Escaped Alone and What If If Only is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 7 February to 8 March 2025.

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In 1961, Yorkshire born Nicholson – a teenage bride, living in a working class terrace in Castleford with her first child, and already on her second marriage – won an astronomical sum of money on the football pools, the nation’s bizarre weekly gambling habit where cash hungry punters attempted to correctly predict which Saturday matches would emerge as draws. Nicholson won £152,319; today, it’s the equivalent of over £4 million.

The story was first dramatised by Jack Rosenthal in 1977, and broadcast as a Play for Today on BBC1. The genesis of this musical adaptation – a collaboration between composer Steve Brown, and Lyricist Justin Greene – goes back to the mid 90’s. Initially, the pair wrote it out of love, only approaching theatres after a year of work. Demo tapes were sent out (Steve Coogan, a regular Brown collaborator, lent his talents to one song). Spend Spend Spend finally fell into the hands of Jude Kelly, then head of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. A hit in Leeds, Spend Spend Spend made it to the West End in 1999.

A sobering rags-to-riches-and-back-again saga, it’s a tale freighted with contemporary resonance. Nicholson was probably the first British reality star, her legend sealed when she famously told the press her intentions: ‘I’m going to spend, spend, spend!’ This Royal Exchange production begins with a gaggle of paparazzi popping bulbs in slow motion, followed by a clever special effect: a giant cheque, bursting into flames. Addicted to excess and seduced by materialism, Viv slowly and painfully learns that money doesn’t buy happiness but does bring a ton of problems.

Everyone here is working at the top of their game. Some scenes could be used as lecture blueprints for aspiring theatre directors. Act 1ends with the ear worm title number, presented as an adrenaline rush of glittery pop art design (care of Grace Smart), and needle sharp choreography (from Lucy Hind). Director Josh Seymour adds so many visual flourishes, it would take a second viewing to notice everything. The ‘Garforth’ section is particularly strong. This is the village Viv and husband Keith moved to after their win, though they were hardly welcomed by their toffee nosed neighbours: Seymour turns the number into a smart, Stepford Wives satire, with the chorus dressed in matching pastel casual wear.

Rose Galbraith plays Young Viv with a sort of exuberant naivety, always on the move to stay ahead of doom’s looming shadow. Rachel Leskovac played that part in the original production, and now returns to play Older Viv. Having two Vivs initially feels like a cheap gimmick but this device ultimately serves to heighten the drama as Older Viv is forced to revisit the wreckage of her life, helplessly looking on like a woman being shepherded to the gallows. There isn’t space to mention everyone in the large cast but Alex James-Hatton (as Keith Nicholson), and Alfie Parker, in a variety of supporting roles, are both impressive. Respect also to Joe Alessi for his amusing turn as the one and only Bruce Forsyth (who famously presented Viv with her cheque).

Where did all the money go? Psychiatrists now have a term for Nicholson’s condition – Sudden Wealth Syndrome. Or a simple curse, if you prefer. Parties, clothes, fancy cars, horse racing, foreign holidays, and trust funds for her kids explain some of her relentless splurging. The tax man comes knocking in Act 2, and there’s a protracted court case which ties the estate up for six bewildering years.

Money pales into insignificance however, when tragedy strikes (to say more would spoil the experience). Given she was also a survivor of domestic violence, it’s fair to say Nicholson was an undiagnosed trauma case, desperately looking for something – booze, fags, shopping, husbands – to take the edge off her sadness. ‘The Scar of Love’ is the musical jewel here, a song so gut wrenchingly vulnerable, it takes you by surprise, and knocks you sideways. ‘Scar’ reappears as a musical motif at various points, and during the moving finale. Older Viv gets the killer final line, which completely upends everything we’ve witnessed.

‘Heriath’ is a Celtic word which roughly translates as ‘a profound longing for something irretrievably lost.’ Spend Spend Spend is quietly devastating in that respect, acknowledging a pain many people experience in life but are unable to express; grief for opportunities forever missed. Viv Nicholson knew she would have been so much happier if she’d never filled in that damned coupon.

Composer Steve Brown sadly died earlier this year, and this production is dedicated to his memory.

Spend Spend Spend is an unmissable triumph.

Spend Spend Spend is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 23 November 2024 to 11 January 2025.

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Determinedly bucking this trend, we now have ‘Sweat’, an American import by writer, Lynn Nottage, who researched diligently and came to understand that the characters who would people her script – blue collar workers from the Pennsylvania rust belt – were not monsters, but decent, flawed humans having their lives smashed to pulp by forces way beyond their control: viz the North American Free Trade Agreement and the financial crash of 2007-8.

Evan, a parole officer (an assured and authoritative performance by Aaron Cobham) conducts a couple of no-holds-barred interviews with deeply troubled clients. One, Jason (Lewis Gibben, all edge and anger) has had his face tattooed while inside and seems to carry the stain of half-absorbed white supremacism. The other, Chris (Abdul Sessay, grimly contrite yet far from humbled) has been touched by faith. Though they were incarcerated separately, whatever crime they committed they shared: “What we did was unforgivable,” laments Chris to Evan.

The body of the story is now told in flashback.

Parole interviews aside, and barring a couple of domestic detours, the action of ‘Sweat’ takes place in the local bar, the preferred venue for holding birthday celebrations or for simply unwinding after a day’s work at the plant. There is drinking, dancing, laughter, the occasional minor spat, then more drinking, a little flirting, more dancing. The women, it’s clear, are at the heart of this working community.

The life of the bar revolves around three female friends; the caustic Tracey (Pooky Quesnel, all tease and temper), Cynthia (Carla Henry, solid and rational, except where Brucie is concerned), and the statuesque dipsomaniac Jessie (Kate Kennedy, wallowing to great effect) still in denial about her husband quitting her for a younger model.

Younger, more innocent versions of Chris and Jason flit in and out of this setting – wild, energetic, but essentially, it would seem, harmless.

We soon learn that this is a one company town. Everyone works (or has worked) at the plant. What’s more, they are proud of it, company men and women, who boast of having been with the same employer not for years but for decades. The plant offers reliable, well-paid work, even if those jobs take a physical toll. When young Chris speaks of paying his own way through college to become a teacher, his charming ne’er-do-well father, Brucie (a slick and sleazy Chris Jack), tries to talk him out of it. Workers at the plant can earn better money than a teacher. By the time Brucie changes his mind on this, it’s too late.

Minor frictions aside, what Nottage wants us to see is the workers’ sense of commitment to the factory. Even young Jason sees his working life as belonging entirely to this single employer. Sure, he wants to retire early and indulge in his passion for motorbikes, but his feeling of being betrayed by Chris’s ambition to teach is grounded in a sense of shared destiny: “I wanted us to retire together.”

Only Stan (Jonathan Kerrigan, clinging onto decency and modest wisdom like a common man’s Statue of Liberty), who runs the bar, hints at the one-way nature of this devotion. When he suffered an industrial injury, he tells the women, the first he heard from the company was a visit from their lawyer to check he wouldn’t be suing them. It seems he did not. Stan manages the bar, but does not own it.

Cynthia announces her intention to apply for a promotion – off the production floor and into the offices. Having first belittled the chances of one of them breaking through into that other world, Tracey – citing her own seniority – says she’ll also apply, without either hope or expectation.

Tensions rise when Cynthia is appointed, and Tracey starts a rumour that ‘positive discrimination’ played a part (Cynthia is African American). Old friendships begin to creak and yield to economic strains.

Before long, bigger issues take hold. There is talk of redundancies, of hefty imposed pay cuts, of the transference of plant machinery to Mexico (where labour is cheaper, unions more pliant). Who else should the “high-ups” get to break the bad news other than the new girl, recently promoted from the shop floor?

And then, of course, there’s Oscar (winningly played by Marcello Cruz), the Columbian immigrant who helps out in the bar; liked but looked down on by the children and grandchildren of earlier generations of immigrant, and deliberately kept out of the plant by a closed-shop union policy. Now, however, the company is circulating leaflets in Spanish, inviting new workers at pay levels below what the union demands, but notably more generous than the hourly rate for bar work. Oscar sees his chance.

Where should loyalties lie? What constitutes solidarity in this greed-induced crisis? Who is to blame and who is to be the scapegoat?

So we come to the act of brutality that will send Jason and Chris to prison (enacted with sufficient commitment to have some on the banquettes wince and recoil).

‘Sweat’ might benefit from a ruthless edit; at times, it ambles along at a small town pace asking its audience’s indulgence, rather than demanding our attention. Ironically, given the writer’s ethnicity, Cynthia’s pride in being a woman of colour breaking new ground with her promotion (and the dilemmas this throws at her) feels somewhat underwritten.

The single set (designed by Good Teeth) is suitably sparse and brutal, but more could perhaps be made (especially early on) of the metallic sparks of the rust belt environment.

The final scene brings us back to the here and now. It is brief and underplayed, some might say underwritten, others might say glib. For my money, it strikes a difficult but truthful note showing us a glimmer of humanity. And what more is there to be hoped for, until the revolution?

Sweat is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 26 April to 25 May 2024. Age guidance 14+

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