Irony of Irony: PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS at ST. ANN’S WAREHOUSE

credit: Johan Persson

The American Premiere of Duncan Macmillan’s PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS at St. Ann’s Warehouse is a thought piece and a gutsy gorgeous thing to behold.  It is also darkly comic.  The play opens meta-theatrically, in mid-sentence. 

And we aren’t the audience we thought we were.  We find ourselves well within another play.  Act IV, the concluding pages of Chekhov’s frequently-produced The Seagull. 

The heroine/anti-heroine Emma of PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS is playing Chekhov’s actress Nina to harrowing and comic effect.  This as we shift our expectations to accommodate an excerpt from this late 19th century work.  It is clear that Emma (a magnificent Denise Gough) is drunk on stage.  Her posture suggests a marionette with a couple of strings cut.  Emma has hit rock bottom during this performance.  As she fumbles to remember her lines, she begins to talk less in the character of Nina and more as herself.  The modes of reality between the role and the performer begin to blur.

 Emma (as Nina) professes to no longer believing in the stage:

Not now that I’ve had real problems.  Real things have happened.  My heart is broken.  I don’t know what to do with my hands when I’m on stage.  I’m not real.  I’m a seagull.  No, that’s wrong.  

Then Emma (as Nina) rallies and says she loves the stage and professes to be “a real actress.”  What is real and what is mimetic, what is the truth and what is lying, are questions at the heart of PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS.

 After a mercurial scene shift and some partying in a nightclub, Emma arrives at a rehabilitation center.  While waiting in the lobby, she phones her mother.  She has  some vital last instructions before the rehab journey begins.   How much passive-aggressive rage she is carrying for Mom becomes apparent through this brutally humorous phone call.  That the center’s doctor and then the therapist look like her mother (all three roles played marvelously by Barbara Marten) gets at the core problem.  Emma is projecting authority figures into the appearance of her mother for good reason. 

PEOPLE is a mother/daughter play.

The prestidigitations of set designer Bunny Christie (renowned for her work with Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night) give the impression of the physical world shape-shifting to accommodate the story, as Emma must first come clean of the drugs and alcohol that are in her system.  Ensemble cast members are cleverly deployed as hallucinatory doubles. The audience sees the world as the heroine does as she fights her way through the effects of addiction toward lucidity.

Just as a linear play has a beginning, middle, and end—so does the recovery process. Emma gives the name Nina when checking in and begins to notice the similarity between the process and acting in a play.  After some intellectual fencing with the Doctor, she learns that the group part of the therapy begins very much like the first day of rehearsal for a play.  Everyone sits in a circle for introductions.

 And here the ambiguity and delightful confusion begun with The Seagull advance further thematically.  How much of Emma’s behavior during recovery is a performance? How much is it an addict’s journey toward recovery?  These questions invite the larger existential one for ourselves and our culture:

 Is the escapism afforded by the dramatic arts more akin to drug addiction than we realize?  Are we so addicted to identification with alter-egos in fictional realities that we can no longer ever be ourselves?  PEOPLE isn’t short on cultural references.  To name a few, Emma references Street Car Named Desire, The Exorcist, Romeo and Juliet, Antigone, Hedda Gabler, and (as explanation for her spiritual awakening) Wile E Coyote. 

Her best friend during recovery Mark (Nathaniel Martello-White) recognizes during Emma’s first talk to the group that she is lying about her background—replacing her bio with Hedda’s.  It is Mark that remembers seeing Emma on stage playing the woman who had her hands cut off.  This a reference to Titus Andronicus that hearkens back to Nina’s opening Seagull statement.  She doesn’t know what to do with her hands while on stage.

 Playwright Duncan Macmillan (Every Brilliant Thing, Lungs, 1984) does know what to do with his hands. He handles heavy topics like parenthood, suicidality, and addiction and recovery with aplomb and power.  PEOPLE is both an example of theatre practice at its most cathartic and a stern Platonic warning against identification with fictional models.  Against lapsing into shadows of ourselves.  Macmillan, quixotically, has mastered the very art he so masterfully calls into question.

After Mark recognizes that Emma is an actress, she recounts her acting addiction in a scintillating monologue.  Near the end, she justifies her theatre compulsion.

But you keep going because sometimes, if you’re really lucky, you get to be onstage and say things that are absolutely true, even if they’re made-up.  You get to do things that feel more real, more authentic, more meaningful than anything in your own life.  You get to speak poetry, words you would never think to say but which become yours as you speak them.

In another twist, she confesses that Emma is the stage name for Sarah.  The name she goes by when she comes back for a second try.  This time with a better attitude.  Whether her character is sober or drug-addled, Denise Gough offers a consistent portrait of an addict’s disdain for reality.  As an actress, Gough is not only a charismatic speaker, but a brilliant, demonstrative listener.

 It is Nina-then-Emma-then-Sarah who engages in the group therapy concept of Practice.  In Practice the patient selects role players from the group who will help them prepare to face the people they must atone with on the outside.  For Sarah practicing is remarkably like rehearsing.  It creates the illusion that she is ready to be frank with her parents for the first time.

Beyond the story’s middle the writing begins to  labor with the stock scenario of hearing-out addicts as they reflect upon their downfalls, their shameful betrayals.  Here director Jeremy Herrin is at his most assertive to keep the drama moving as one character’s story tumbles into another.  

After succeeding at Practice, one thing remains for Emma.  A spiritual awakening.  Instead of surrendering to a higher power, Emma offers Mark insight.   A radicalization of the sentiment Nina utters in The Seagull:

I came to a realization. Paul said it once. This is all bullshit.  None of it’s real.  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 game with the programme.  With everything, really.  Language. Politics.  Money.  Religion.  Law.  At some level we all know it’s bullshit.  A magical group delusion.

 By the time our alleged heroine finally confronts her actual mother, the audience has trekked with her for weeks of compressed recovery treatment and more than two hours of actual clock time.  Long enough to be poised for resolution.  Instead we are met with a coup de grace Brechtian distancing effect.  Hit by a bucket of cold water.

Rather than experience cathartic resolution, like the drama junkies we are, we are forced to stand back and to observe.  Suddenly we suspect what it must be like to suffer like the parent of a drug-and-theatre addicted child who is approaching forty.

 The generic title PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS ironically refers to what addicts must avoid to prevent a relapse.  Those people, places, and things that one associates with drug use.  The trouble for the addict is that the world is nothing but people, places, and things.  For that matter, so is the theatre.

 PEOPLES, PLACES & THINGS  (Oct. 19-Dec. 3) is the first collaboration between St. Ann’s Warehouse and The National Theatre.  It runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes with one intermission.