People, Places & Things review
Denise Gough blazes in the return of Duncan Macmillan’s electrifying drama of addiction and identity
What an astonishing head rush this is, back in the West End nearly a decade after its National Theatre premiere. Duncan Macmillan’s drama is a hurtling exploration of addiction, existential crisis and identity, at once visceral and brainy, and Jeremy Herrin’s staging, in a Headlong co-production, is electrifying: a sensory immersion galvanised with euphoria and panic, rage, fear and pain. And once again, it is driven by a phenomenal performance from Denise Gough as Emma, whose struggle to get clean is conveyed with such sweaty, nauseous, wracking vividness that, watching it, you almost forget to breathe.
Emma is an actor, habitually chasing thrilling, intense experiences onstage, where she can be whomever she chooses and live out moments of high drama, and offstage, in drink, drugs and hedonistic excess. After the traumatic death of her brother, she spirals out of control – in a mesmerising opening scene we find her, wrecked but glittering, stumbling through a scene in Chekhov’s The Seagull – and in desperation, she checks into rehab. She’s hoping for a quick fix to set her back on her feet, rather than any transformative process. But she quickly finds herself up against the spirituality-steeped language of the 12-step programme – for which she has a robust contempt – and a systematic demolition of her view of the world and her place within it. Her survival, she discovers, might depend on the renunciation of everything familiar, and a deconstruction of her very sense of self.
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Bunny Christie’s white-tiled set is clinically claustrophobic, and Herrin’s traverse staging ramps up both Macmillan’s theatrical metaphor and the panicky impression that Emma has nowhere to hide, caught between two banks of watchful eyes. An overlay of video by Andrzej Goulding makes the walls appear to ripple and disintegrate queasily, and Emma is haunted by hallucinations in which multiple spectral selves – a procession of tormented, identical doubles – rise out of her bed or pace in agonised circles around her.
Gough is blazingly charismatic, combining pugnacious swagger, fierce intelligence and raw vulnerability, and her struggle is enormously relatable: who hasn’t felt that exhilaration or oblivion might be the only sane response to a life of deadening predictability or a world gone mad? Macmillan gives extra context to the attraction of freefall recklessness with subtle updates to his text referencing Brexit, Covid and Trump. And Gough is powerfully supported by an ensemble portraying medics, staff and fellow addicts, among them doppelgängers of her own family members. Sinéad Cusack is the infuriatingly calm doctor who reminds Emma of her brutally judgemental mother; Malachi Kirby a sharp-eyed patient who sees through Emma’s defences and, in therapeutic role play, turns out to be perfect casting as her dead brother.
It’s all as nerve-shreddingly riveting as it is provocatively thoughtful, a pure adrenaline shot of theatre that leaves your mind buzzing with ideas and questions. Outstanding.
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