Review: Louise Lambert brings cinematic subtlety to People, Placed, and Things | Canada Voices

• Title: People, Places, and Things
• Written by: Duncan Macmillan
• Director: Diana Bentley
• Actors: Louise Lambert, Oliver Dennis, Farhang Ghajar
• Company: Coal Mine Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: To March 7, 2025

An original cast can exert a strange force over a play’s posterity. That actor-character entanglement may be even knottier in the case of a (de facto) one-person show. This seems to be what’s happened with Irish actress Denise Gough and Duncan Macmillan’s People, Place and Things, which premiered at London’s National Theatre in 2015.

Despite an ensemble of 10 actors, the play was Gough’s to own and became a career-resuscitating vehicle for the underrated actress. Critics raved about her raw, no-holds-barred performance as Emma, a woman in addiction crisis and recovery, to the extent that Gough became inextricable from any discussion of the play. She won an Olivier award, took the role to the West End in 2016, New York in 2017 and, finally back to London for a sold-out remount last year.

So the first order of business for any new production is to find an Emma who can measure up. Thank God Diana Bentley, director of the production at the Coal Mine Theatre, had Louise Lambert on her radar. Lambert is one of those rare performers who matches a huge theatrical presence with cinematic subtlety and detail. On stage, her face seems translucent. Thoughts and feelings surface as though a layer of skin has been peeled back. Her emotions are big but effortlessly natural; a channel opens and demons come out. It can make her downright mesmerizing to watch.

Consider Lambert’s work in the play’s opening sequence, a play within a play. Emma, an actor, is performing as Nina in the tragic penultimate scene of Chekhov’s The Seagull. As Nina’s grip on reality slackens, Emma loses her balance and her words begin to slur. We see Nina as we’ve never seen her – confused, unbalanced, genuinely deranged – before realizing it’s Emma in the midst of a breakdown. Then in one breathless sequence, Emma goes from partying at a pulsing nightclub to enduring a twitchy post-drug comedown in the hard light of day. They say it’s difficult to play drunk convincingly on stage. Imagine playing some combination of drunk, amphetamine-high, and benzo-stoned, while shuddering involuntarily, screaming at your mom on the phone and attempting to check yourself into rehab? Lambert pulls this off seamlessly. I was persuaded by every spasm.

The play sees Emma move through crisis, denial, relapse, desperation, acceptance, recovery and, finally, toward something that approximates redemption. This journey landed for me, thanks in large part to Lambert’s talent and Bentley’s deft direction of her lead actress. But I’m left confused by the rest of the play. It goes without saying that addiction is harrowing and relentless – brutal for the addict, heartbreaking for their family, exhausting for both. The suffering can seem all the more inane because of its Sisyphean quality and idiopathy. Some addictions are inscrutable, the upshot of genes and social exposure, with no trauma or inciting incident to provide answers or explanations.

You might say Macmillan is interested in this lack of interestingness. He doesn’t want to get philosophical or diagnostic about addiction; he wants us to look the beast in the eye and accept the blank stare it offers in return. Emma insists there’s no trauma or abuse in her history; she’s an addict because modern life is painful and purposeless, making drugs the sane response to an insane world. She has no patience for the religious overtones of the 12-step recovery program and loses respect for her doctor when she spots a crucifix around her neck.

Like Foucault and Derrida, two writers she admires, Emma believes meaning is relative, personalities are constructs, and that life sucks when you’re not high. It’s hard to believe that Macmillan thinks he’s offering anything new here, and yet “God” comes up so many times as a counterpoint that we must assume he’s trying to introduce an interesting tension.

Of course, Emma is also an actor, and we learn quickly that she likes to make things up. In her first pseudo attempt to share in group therapy, she recounts the plot of Hedda Gabbler, peddling it as her life story. When she finally opens up to a fellow patient (Farhang Ghajaar), she draws parallels between the high of being onstage and the high of doing drugs, and keeps returning to the postmodern idea that there are no stable truths or identities. Macmillan seems determined to conflate the person with the problem; like her addiction, Emma is a cypher we won’t be able to understand. Realistic? Maybe. But it’s not especially satisfying as the culmination of two-and-a-half hours of theatre.

For all the big ideas the play points to, it doesn’t seem to amount to much more than a woman’s struggle with group therapy. Dance sequences (choreographed by Alyssa Martin) in which other Emmas (performers in blonde wigs) enact nightmarish scenarios of puking, rocking, shuddering didn’t land for me. As externalizations of an addict’s suffering, the concept felt a bit obvious and flat, sometimes unintentionally funny in the Coal Mine’s close quarters. As a point of contrast, I thought of Crystal Pite and Jonathan Young’s moving externalization of an addict’s experience in Betroffenheit (the 2017 Olivier-award winning production that toured the world to international acclaim) with electronic sound, light and shadow catapulting us into the addict’s unique personal hell.

I’m not sure what we’re left with other than a great performance. Lambert has been unforgivably underused in the Toronto theatre scene; it’s great to see her in this kind of vulnerable, demanding and emotional role.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)