Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 play about addiction is a tricksy and unnerving thing, even for those who know what’s coming. This reprise of the original National Theatre and Headlong production reunites some of its main players including director Jeremy Herrin and Denise Gough, who won an Olivier award for her lead performance.
Gough plays Emma, an actor undergoing rehab for drink and drug addiction with no clear backstory. We follow her into a rehabilitation centre and a therapy circle of addicts telling their respective stories. At first it seems like a paler version of Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, recently revived at the National Theatre. The group scenes are protracted yet do not travel deep enough into the philosophical questions raised, and rehearse much that is overfamiliar, from the testimonies of those in rehab to the relationship between addict and therapist (Sinéad Cusack). There are also mentions of Trump, Ukraine and Covid, rather too shoehorned in.
Gough does not seem quite fully invested as Emma but this is exactly what the role requires, as her performance captures every turn of her character’s psyche. Emma is not only a pathological addict but also a pathological actor (“If I am not a character, I’m not even sure I’m there,” she says) although you only see the extent of this in hindsight.
The swivel that comes with the second act is not quite as stark as that in Anthony Neilson’s mental health play The Wonderful World of Dissocia, but it casts a new, dark light on the first act nonetheless, raising questions around the efficacy, and ethics, of the kind of 12-step programme to which Emma submits. The brutal power of the play is engineered as a creep, the “boo” of the second act not quite as tacky as a twist but a shock nonetheless.
Bunny Christie’s pulsating white set design shows Emma bared – a specimen to be examined through the speculum of the stage, while simultaneously taking us into her mind, with all its distorted perceptions. The configuration of the auditorium mirrors this duality, giving the illusion of an audience that is seeing itself from without as well as being within.
In Emma’s mother (also played by Cusack) and father (Kevin McMonagle), we see a soured but dogged love, shorn of hope. Anyone who has been close to an addict will know better than to judge them. The scene in which they appear is vital and also utterly destabilising because there is no clear line between abuser and abused.
Emma’s outcome is defined by us, it seems, the play a dramatic Rorschach test, of sorts. To me, Macmillan seems to be saying that not only is there no escape for an addict from the people, places and things that cause their addiction, but that their only refuge takes them back to the original source of their pain. How bleak – but also brilliantly done.
At Trafalgar theatre, London, until 10 August
