People, Places and Things
I went for a coffee, not so long ago, with a thespian friend who talked with animated excitement and passion of the moments when you watch theatre and forget you’re watching theatre at all. It’s such a rare experience for me, that I’d forgotten what it had felt like. Then I went to watch People, Places and Things at the Bristol Old Vic. I had those moments in which reality and fiction collide together and stop in one beautiful bubble, where nothing exists at all but what is being felt and the intensity of that fills every inch of your being. The play was chaotic and raw. Almost too raw in the sense that at points it felt as though someone had placed a mirror between myself in the most hideous scenes of my past and the stage the story fell on. I sat so close I could almost smell the sweat. Confronted with white boxed walls I was dragged back to hospital beds, I dug my knuckles into my seat. The set- genius simplicity, contemporary and perfectly stark to reflect the aching wal...