People, Places and Things

People, Places and Things is a play by the British playwright Duncan Macmillan.

Emma, a talented theatre actress, collapses during rehearsals for a staging of The Seagull by Chekhov, due to the abuse of alcohol and drugs; the company she works for dismisses her and requires her to detox in order to return to acting. Unwillingly, Emma checks in a rehabilitation clinic, initially determined to stay there only the time necessary to be declared clean and return to work: in facts she ends up staying there several months.

After a long and difficult drug treatment, Emma begins to interact with the community of the clinic: some nurses and doctors are in fact ex-patients, who serve there in order of remain under observation; this is the case of nurse Foster, who immediately takes Emma in sympathy. Even the doctor who has her in treatment (who looks disturbingly like her mother) is particularly interested in her case, and offers her a singular method of self-help that leads the patient to directly facing people, places and things that trigger their addiction. Emma agrees to try the method despite her strong skepticism, which leads her to reject for a long time the group sessions provided by the program.

Some time later, Emma has completed much of the program, but she cannot be declared clean unless she attends the group sessions; she is therefore forced to take part. Her new psychotherapist pushes her to talk openly about the traumas that brought her to addictions; she responds by showing all her acting skills, telling unlikely stories (in which, however, fragments of truth are hidden). This gives her the hostility of Mark, another patient; the situation worsen with the break-in of Paul, a psycholable patient who had been removed from the group for having introduced heroin in the clinic: he tries to apologize to the group and tells Emma that he had begun to take drugs after his partner had died of an overdose. When the other patients refuse to readmit him, Emma vehemently emphasizes the hypocrisy of the group, thus starting a fight; the psychotherapist therefore threatens to expel her too, which would result in the impossibility of being declared healed.

Emma decides to keep on attending the group sessions, during which patients can practise, i.e. stage moments when, after the therapy, they will come in touch with the causes of their addiction, in order to be trained to avoid it. Emma stubbornly refuses to take part in those stagings, despite the insistence of Mark (who, after the initial reluctance, sincerely longs to help her); it is precisely with him that Emma opens up for the first time: she reveals her real name, Sarah; she tells him about her beloved brother, who despite a much more stable life had died from a cerebral hemorrhage; she talks about her poor relationship with parents. She says she chose to be an actress so she could live many wonderful lives instead of her own miserable one; she then compares her experience in the clinic to the theater, insinuating that neither will save her.

Some time later, Mark is declared healed and can leave the clinic; during the party in his honor, Emma bursts into a remarkable state of alteration and violently reveals the same truths she had told Mark to all her companions; in the face of all the lies she told, everyone turns their backs on her: the girl then leaves the clinic and gets drunk in a nightclub, ending up collapsing.

Two months after her escape, Emma fell back into her addictions and returns to the clinic to detoxify; this time, however, she appears more decisive and submissive. Here she notes all the changes the clinc has undergone during her absence: Mark became a nurse and replaced Foster, who died after having fallen back into drug addiction; Paul found comfort in religion, which nevertheless prompted him to drink even more. The Doctor initially proves hostile to her, and both she and Mark doubt that she will ever really recover because of her refusal to face her trauma.

In facts, Emma proves to be very collaborative and confides again with Mark, telling her that she had undertaken the profession of actress by pure chance: her first role was for a company in a fair, during which she enunciated a very trivial motivational speech. She therefore admits that she has never really faced the death of her brother, and that she would want the approval of her mother, who has always opposed her in every chose she made. Some time later she even agrees to stage, during a group session, the confrontation with her parents: for the first time, Emma confronts them and admits her own discomfort. This leads the Doctor to declare her healed.

Emma returns to her parents' house, where she tries to replicate what she has staged in the clinic; things do not go as they should: the father says he does not believe her and tacks her of selfishness, saying that she would have had to die instead of her brother; the mother says that she believes Emma will never be able to get out of her addictions. The mother has in fact kept all the drugs that, before rehabilitation, Emma had asked her to destroy; therefore she is condamned to remain with people, places and things that cause her addiction.

In the last scene, Emma poorly emphasisedly enunciated the same motivational speech that had earned her her first engagement as an actress.

The inaugural production was directed by Jeremy Herrin and staged in the Dorfman Theatre at the National Theatre in London in 2015. The play was widely praised by critics for its depiction of addiction, and Denise Gough, in the central role, won the Critics Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress. The production transferred to Wyndham's Theatre in 2016. Denise Gough won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for her role.^[1] The production toured the UK with Lisa Dwyer Hogg as Emma from September 2017 and transferred with Gough to St. Ann's Warehouse in New York City in October 2017.

The play returned to the West End in 2024 for a 14-week run at the Trafalgar Theatre, with Denise Gough reprising her role as Emma.^[2]