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 walls of insanity. The play cannon balled through addiction, with such speed and noise it reverberated through me like steps over a grave. Emma’s an actor, drowning in addiction; craving sobriety, craving life. Her story of recovery is spewed out violently; her crawl into treatment, her gut wrenching relationships, her pain. I heard scattered chuckles across the theatre at the 12 step references and knew I wasn’t the only person in recovery there.

Lisa Dwyer Hogg plays Emma with such integrity and strength that after I had an itching urge to find her and thank her for telling a story that could almost be mine with such conviction. I wanted to thank her for sharing what this disease really feels like. Because seeing needles in veins, bone fisted fights, and clichés isn’t always important, and is often harmful. We never find out the answers, the history of trauma, not really. But we do find out- the most imperative thing- is what it’s really like to be broken by addiction in every aspect of its unyielding brutality. Thanks to Duncan Macmillan’s impeccable script, written with wit and pain that simmers so deeply under the skin of this illness. The ensemble of actors works immaculately together, each character played with weighted significance. Each story demolishing cruel stereotypes, their parts integral and gritty, the relationships between them true. There was nothing said that I thought could not have been said by me or someone else I know who suffers with addiction.

The play peals away at this deeply stigmatised yet dangerously glamorised illness and displays the bones of addiction in the very way it desperately needs to be shown in. It talks of more than addiction, it’s a play about what it really is to be alive and it makes us question the very threads of our existence. People Places and Things is an experience that must be seen, felt and heard by all; it’s nothing short of outstanding.  

Headlong Theatre, directed by Jeremy Herrin- People, Places and Things is on at Bristol Old Vic until Saturday, then goes on to Exeter Northcott Theatre, Nuffield Southampton Theatres, Liverpool Playhouse and Cambridge Arts Theatre. Staring Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Michael Balogun, Trevor Fox, Susan Lawson- Reynolds, Ekow Quartey, Andrew Sheridan, Imogen Slaughter, Aimee-Lou Wood and Matilda Ziegler.