⭐️2016 winner of 2 Olivier Awards:
Sound Design (T.Gibbons) & Best Actress (D.Gough) ⭐️
NB: I reviewed this show when it was at the National Theatre in 2015 but People Places and Things is transferring to the West End from the 15th March 2016. There are some affordable tickets for the onstage seating which is always an experience! book here!
I have been following the work of Headlong Theatre Company for 8 years now and I find I am never disappointed after one of their shows. In fact, I count 
some of them amongst my favourite theatre experiences ever (The Effect, also at the National, will stay with me forever, I am sure of that), and even when they haven’t completely won me over, they have always managed to interest me and often surprise me.
So expectations were high as I walked into the National’s Dorfman Theatre for Duncan Macmillan‘s new play People, Places and Things, which follows actress Emma as she voluntarily commits herself into a rehab centre to tackle her substance abuse problem.
Under the clever and always ingenious direction of Jeremy Herrin, Denise Gough as Emma gives one of the most affecting performances I have seen all year. Her portrayal of addiction is masterful and, although the character is hardly likeable, we do feel deeply for her. It’s especially heartbreaking for both her and us to realise, just as she starts to get better, that the damage she has caused around her simply cannot be repaired.
A strong ensemble creates the population of the rehab centre, with the excellent Barbara Marten multi-rolling her way from a no-bullshit doctor, to a birkenstock-wearing, irritatingly calm therapist and finishing off with a pretty brutal (though not unjustified) mother who gives Emma a potentially fatal dose of tough love.
Just like in the American The Motherfucker with the Hat, another play about addiction seen at the National earlier this year, the protagonist’s road to recovery follows the twelve-step program, a set of principles that form the basis of the Alcoholic Anonymous organisation, with a religious influence and the heavy undertones of a creed rather than a treatment. The cynical Emma is as skeptical as I am about it to begin with, and it takes her a couple of goes to fully buy into “the program”. She eventually seems to embrace it as her only option to avoid complete self-destruction.
As gloomy as the subject is, Macmillan’s script is full of humour, with a couple of moments involving falafel and the purpose of saying Amen (You have to say Amen. – Why? – It’s like pressing Send on an email) getting full-blown laughs from us. But the play doesn’t shy away from the darkness of addiction, and Herrin’s production is at its most powerful when portraying what’s happening in Emma’s head: through impressive projections by Andrzej Goulding (on a slick and multi-functional box of a set by Bunny Christie), we see her surroundings crumble, and the clever employment of 6 Emma duplicates gives us the full sense of her out-of-body experience preceding her frequent black-outs.
What the play’s title refers to is the idea that as long as addicts can avoid the people, the places and the things that trigger their substance abuse, then they will be able to make a full recovery. This, as Emma soon realises, is almost impossible to achieve outside the walls of the rehab centre, and seems to incarnate the frustrating impracticalities of “the program”.
People, Places and Things is at the National Theatre’s Dorfman Theatre until the 4th November.
Tip: I saw the show from one of the £15 restricted view seats in the circle, which wasn’t too bad (just avoid the high seats, you really don’t get a great view from those), but as the run is mostly sold out, the best way to get good seats at an affordable price is through the National Theatre’s Friday Rush: every Friday at 1pm they release a certain number of £20 tickets online for the following week’s performances, so get on it if you don’t want to miss the chance to see this beautifully striking play.
Theatre Truffles 