People, Places and Things - NT / Tour / Trafalgar Revival

Apr 29, 2016 14:01:06 GMT @theatremonkey said:

I think it may come down to how much you empathise with internalised emotional distress. If you recognise it easily in yourself, then the play will instantly hook. If it isn't something you are particularly conscious of - and a lot of people are lucky not to be - then it's a harder climb.

Agree Ms Gough works very hard, and deserves her success, but I still stand by my feeling that her psychologist was the deeper performance.

Absolutely. There were things that Emma would say about the way she saw the world in its brutal, unpleasant, unforgiving, godless awfulness that chimed with me, or at least felt like a way of looking at the world I recognised. Macmillan wrote many many moments where a character described extreme joy, extreme sadness, extreme melancholia, extreme confusion, or any extreme emotion we’ve all felt; throughout so many of these deeply touching, deeply relatable speeches I, who am lucky enough to have never been an addict, thought ‘There but for the grace of god go I’. And I think the variety of other characters, some nicer than others, some more troubled than others, rather mediated this – Emma’s clearly the most charismatic addict there, but some of the duller ones allowed for many, broader entry points into this. Plus Herrin’s direction was so full on I was in Emma’s head from pretty much the word go.

And actually, Ryan, I think the best thing to say is yes, I found the characters irritating too. How Macmillan managed it I’ll never know, but he managed to show that people like Emma can be a wee bit annoying yet never had us off of her side. Gough deserves so much credit for this too (whenever I talk about the play, I tend to talk about direction and writing and leave her out of it – that’s wrong of me, she’s beyond incredible), but Emma got on my nerves, and the fact that she was allowed to be grating and problematic and not that awful cliché of a ‘strong female character’ is what made this so special. Had this painted addiction merely as some kind of last chance saloon that the desperate and mistreated go to and thus not dared to show addiction as dislikeable, it would have been terrible. Had this taken the tone of Sir David Hare’s terrible My Zinc Bed – that if it’s addiction or desire you have to sacrifice, be an addict – it would have been terrible. I think we never lost our sympathy with people who often knew that they were now trapped with something destructive within them for the rest of their lives, yet we weren’t asked to sympathise with their violence, their selfishness or their rudeness. We could empathise both with the victims and sufferers of addiction, and dislike them in their dislikeable moments. I thought this script was really quite incredible.

Also got to agree about Barbra Marten though. A truly amazing performance of withheld anger and a difficult life lived that was the perfect counterpoint to the louder, larger characters around her. That she was overlooked by not only the Oliviers but most reviews I’ve read disappoints and astounds me. But truly the bee’s knees is Denise.