Theatre Review - People, Places and Things

Denise Gough and Sinéad Cusack in People, Places and Things [Marc Brenner]















DUNCAN Macmillan’s spellbinding play, first produced in 2015, depicts another actress struggling with addiction, but is markedly more successful than Opening Night, which closed earlier this month.

Denise Gough reprises her Olivier Award-winning role as Emma, an actress reliant on booze and drugs, whose life is unravelling.

People, Places and Things opens with the final act of Chekhov’s The Seagull. Emma, playing Nina, is dazed. Afterwards, she checks into rehab wanting a clean bill of health for work. But as her doctor/therapist (both played by Sinéad Cusack) points out, recovery takes time and work.

Emma hides behind the characters she plays and her own version of the truth. She finds it hard to admit that she has a problem. In group therapy she prefers participating in everyone else’s roleplay rather than facing her own demons.

“People, places and things” refers to the triggers that can lead to a relapse, but as Emma surmises: isn’t that just life? She hints that her brother’s death traumatised her, but when she visits her parents towards the end (a devastating scene) we see a different perspective.

Audience members sit either side of Bunny Christie’s white-tiled set emphasising the strain of constant scrutiny. We watch each other observing Emma and her fellow members in group therapy.

Jeremy Herrin’s electrifying production contains bursts of deafening sound which pound our chests and frenzied scenes featuring Emma clones. Both give a vivid sense of her inner life and emotional state.

Herrin deftly draws out the play’s darkly comic moments as well as the tragedy of alcohol and drug dependency.

The ensemble cast is superb, but the star of the show is undeniably Gough whose performance is a tour de force.

Unmissable.

Until August 10

peopleplacesandthingsonstage.com/ 

Originally published by Westminster Extra