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by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Jeremy Herrin

National Theatre & Headlong, Trafalgar Theatre, London, GBR

May 14-August 10, 2024

Emma: “If I’m not in character I’m not sure I’m really there. I’m already dead. I’m nothing”

For anyone visiting London, People, Places and Things is the must-see British play of the moment. The play originally premiered at the National Theatre in 2015. It then transferred to a West End theatre, toured the UK and played in New York in 2017. The current production is a remount with Denise Gough reprising the central role of Emma that she created in 2015. Every possible superlative was heaped on Gough for her amazing performance including an Olivier Award in 206. The remount gives those who missed it the first time a chance to see why Gough, the play and its production received such ecstatic praise and still deserves it.

The action is plays out on Bunny Christie’s set of bright white tiles that line the floor and walls. There are raked seats on stage so that the audience on stage and we in the orchestra stalls can see each other throughout. This heightens the effect of the tiled set as a laboratory where we the audience observe an experiment.

The play begins during a performance of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896), where the characters of Nina and Konstantin in their 19th-century costumes look totally out of place on the modern set. The scene is the famous one near the end of the play where Nina tells Konstantin, “I am a seagull – no – no, I am an actress”. Emma, who is playing Nina, fades in and out of the text until she is rambling and collapses. Next, we see her dancing hopped up in a disco. Following this we see that Emma has checked herself into a rehab clinic. She has so dosed herself that she unable to stand or speak properly.

Emma, who checks in under the name “Nina”, is under the delusion that her addiction to drugs and alcohol can be cured in about a week after which the nameless Doctor, who runs the clinic, will give her letter stating that “Nina” is no longer an employment risk. Emma is shocked to discover that the process takes at least 90 days and that the Doctor issues no such letters about risk.

The remainder of Act 1 of the two-act play is a struggle between Emma and everyone around her. A central part of rehab is group therapy where fellow addicts sit in a circle and share tales of their addiction with other, receive input and express what they have learned. Emma is averse to all of this. She especially does not like sessions where a patient chooses a fellow patient to act out a significant scene from their past or a scene that they wish would happen. Emma keeps getting chosen as an acting partner but refuses to enact any scene about herself. The one time she decides to tell her life story, one of the fellow patients identifies it as the plot of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. All we learn from scattered remarks is that Emma has never gotten over the death of her younger brother, the son that her parents preferred to her.

Act 1 reaches a climax with the graduation (meaning the successful end of treatment) of the one fellow patient Emma has come to like and confide in. Emma ruins his celebration with a furious tirade against all the assumptions the rehab institution makes about its patients and the belief that their paltry Twelve-Step methodology will in any way prepare them for life in the outside world. The patients are told that they must avoid all people, places and things that may trigger a relapse into addiction. But, as Emma notes, “That’s everything!”

In Act 2, Emma returns to the clinic as quite a different person. She is no longer belligerent but frightened. She has come to believe that if she continues to drink and use she will kill herself. This act is like a repetition of Act 1 but at a more rapid pace and with an Emma who restrains her universal scepticism to gain some benefit from the process. The most shattering scene of the play is when Emma has graduated and returns home to apologize to her parents for all the grief she has caused them. Her return is greeted with such icy disdain that we suddenly realize that it is no wonder that a child growing up with parents like that would turn to drugs for escape.

On one level, Macmillan’s play is a harrowing depiction of addiction and recovery, and it would be a great play even if that were its only subject. Yet, by making an actor, Emma, as its central character, Macmillan also makes the play a commentary about acting and life. An assistant at the clinic notes that addicts are expert liars, that’s why getting patients to speak truthfully is important for the process to work. Yet, the process itself, especially in group therapy uses acting as a way at getting to the truth. Emma says that acting is easier than real life because you know who you are and what you are supposed to think and feel. As Emma says, “If I’m not in character I’m not sure I’m really there. I’m already dead. I’m nothing”.

Macmillan expands on the notion of all human interactions as acting by pointing out the fictions that people agree on to make life appear to have meaning. Emma states this directly, “When I’m on stage I know it’s all pretend. I’m not the person I’m pretending to be. Everyone else knows that. But somehow it doesn’t matter. We all just sort of decide that it’s real. It’s the same with the programme. With everything, really. Language. Politics. Money. Religion. Law. At some level we all know it’s all bullshit. A magical group delusion”. Macmillan thus invites us to deconstruct human activity, including the theatre, even as we experience it.

In Emma, Macmillan has created an extraordinarily demanding role for a female actor. Not only does Emma manifest an entire scale of moods from mania to deep depression, from aggression to vulnerability, but her manner of speech and gesture is affected by what kinds of drugs she has taken and by her stage of withdrawal from those drugs. On top of this Emma is emotionally labile and can switch from mood to mood without warning. She is marked by a wicked sense of humour, funny when it is turned on others, not so funny when she turns it on herself. Gough comprehends all this complexity in a completely natural performance. Anyone who has known an alcoholic or a drug addict will immediately recognize the ruses and self-deceit practiced by Gough’s character.

But this is not all. Gough’s Emma is a person who, at least in Act 2, is consciously striving to overcome her addiction. So, Gough ever so gradually lessens the wildness of Emma’s mood swings. When we finally hear Gough’s Emma speak in non-histrionic, non-slurred speech, it’s as if a new person has been born out of the former Emma. It’s a magnificent performance.

Through the entire play, even when Emma is high or suffering from withdrawal, Gough makes clear that Emma is highly intelligent, too intelligent really to be able to accept the Twelve Step programme fully especially with its constant references to God, e.g. Step 6 – “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character”. Emma is an atheist and an existentialist who believes that existence has no purpose. Her struggle is to convince herself that life is a gift.

Of the characters Emma encounters, the Doctor is the most important. She reminds Emma of her mother, a fact whose import we can’t fully grasp until late in the play when we meet her. Sinéad Cusack plays the Doctor with all the understanding of someone who has seen every kind of patient in every kind of state. Cusack has the Doctor periodically suppress a bemused smile when Emma, who seems totally out of control, manifests a behaviour she has seen before. Cusack’s portrayal of the Therapist is so similar to her Doctor that I did not realize they were meant to be separate characters. It is a shock, then, when we see Cusack later play Emma’s mother. The audience gasped to hear an older woman with such a calm voice say such utterly damaging things to her own daughter.

We first meet the man who plays Emma’s father in his role as Paul, the first patient we meet at the clinic who stomps on barefoot with “THE END” painted on his bare chest. Kevin McMonagle gives Paul’s raving such a violent edge, any person less drugged than Emma would immediately flee the clinic. As Emma’s father, McMonagle manages to radiate a lack of interest in his daughter so profound it sucks all the air out of the room. In its quietness it is more disturbing than the ranting of Paul.

The one friend that Emma makes at the clinic is Mark, whom Macmillan has not accidentally given the same name as Emma’s dead brother. In Act 1, Malachi Kirby plays Mark as the first patient willing to call out Emma’s negative attitude and lack of participation. Mark is nearing the end of his treatment so he knows where Emma’s urge to rebel comes from and knows that it will go nowhere. In Act 2, Kirby, now “cured” has let go of the nervous mannerisms that he had earlier used as Mark. He now plays Mark as a sounding board willing to listen to any thoughts Emma has and as willing to guide her past her inherently ironic world view. As he says, “The hardest thing is to love yourself. To be kind to yourself. After everything”.

The play receives a tremendously imaginative production under director Jeremy Herrin. He has decided that Act 1, when Emma first enters the clinic, should be as disorienting as possible. Bunny Christie’s set may look solid and empty, but soon we find that a reception desk rises out of the floor, later Emma’s room is formed by set pieces pushed through the walls left and right. In Emma’s nightmares she becomes several Emmas all trying to escape. Some come through the tiled wall, others up through the very bed she’s lying in. The arrival of Emma’s childhood bedroom is unlike anything I’ve seen in the theatre.

In Toronto we have seen Macmillan’s small-scale plays – Lungs (2011) and Every Brilliant Thing (2013). Both plays are about finding reasons for living in a world that seems so unkind. People, Places and Things takes up the same question, only on a much larger scale, putting both the main character and the audience through an emotional wringer and leading to a much more ambiguous conclusion. Having missed the play’s first production, I feel extraordinarily privileged to have seen its revival, especially with the incandescent Denise Gough.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Denise Gough (and others) as Emma; Denise Gough as Emma; Denise Gough as Emma and Sinéad Cusack as Therapist with the ensemble; Malachi Kirby as Mark, Denise Gough as Emma and Danny Kirrane as Foster. © 2024 Marc Brenner.

For tickets visit: trafalgartheatre.com.