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by Duncan Macmillan, directed by Diana Bentley

Coal Mine Theatre, 2076 Danforth Avenue, Toronto

February 13-March 9, 2025

Mark to Emma: “You’re a human hand grenade”

Coal Mine Theatre has mounted an exciting production of Canadian English-language premiere of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things. The play premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2015 and was acclaimed for its complex depiction of addiction and the path to recover from it. It was also acclaimed for its extraordinary design concept that sought to portray visually an addict’s frightening experience of the world as chaos. Ted Dykstra, Artistic Director of Coal Mine states in his Note in the programme, “This show is akin to us doing Les Miz, size-wise”. Nevertheless, Coal Mine succeeds in making what seems impossible possible and its production is a showcase for fine acting and the power of imaginative design and movement.

In June 2024 I happened to see a revival of the original production featuring Denise Gough, who created the central role of Emma. I wrote an extensive review of the play thinking I would likely never see it again. Those wishing a detailed description of the plot and the design should look there. In brief, the play concerns the actor Emma, who suddenly becomes disoriented while performing the role of Nine in Chekhov’s The Seagull. This scares her enough that she checks herself into a rehabilitation clinic. Rather than accept the rules of the clinic, she rages against them until she becomes disruptive and leaves. After another scare in the outside world, she checks in again, this time with a much more compliant attitude. The question Macmillan pursues is whether people become addicts because they are messed up or because the world is messed up. Macmillan expands this question further into an inquiry of how people can find meaning in an inherently meaningless universe.

The original production and the revival featured onstage seating and a narrow acting space inside a frame. One aspect of the rehab clinic that Macmillan emphasizes is that there is nowhere to hide, and placing the audience on both side of the stage reinforced that. The design also cleverly emphasized a further point by making us literally look through the story on stage to see ourselves.

Set designer Steve Lucas has outdone the original concept by turning the entire auditorium of the Coal Mine Theatre into the rehab clinic with white tiled walls enclosing the whole audience. The Coal Mine production does not have an onstage audience. Instead, the audience in divided into two facing halves of about 50 members each on either side of a square playing area. Here there is even less room to hide because there are single rows of seats on the other two sides of the square. Entrances and exits of necessity come through the audience to the central square, and for certain scenes actors sit in the midst of the audience.

The original set by Bunny Christie featured white tiled surfaces that looked solid but proved to be disturbingly permeable. The small space of the Coal Mine Theatre doesn’t allow any such effect. However, the design team compensates for it in myriad inventive ways. When the hallucinating Emma first appears in the clinic, lighting designers Bonnie Beecher and Jeff Pybus have the Exit sign which first appeared stable begin to change size, move about and proliferate. By emphasizing the word “Exit”, the designers underscore both Emma’s motivation for entering the clinic (to exit the frightening world she is living in) and the fear that underlies Emma’s life as an addict (overdosing to exit life entirely). Sound designer Thomas Ryder Payne uses echoes and distortion during Emma’s hallucinatory phases to portray Emma’s mental instability sonically.

One feature of the original production that director Diana Bentley has adopted is using the actors who play other people in the clinic as a type of movement chorus. On admission and in undergoing detox, Emma’s sense of self is in danger of fracturing. When this happens, five other actors, cleverly dressed and wigged by designer Laura Delchiaro to look like Emma, thrash and writhe about in movement director Alyssa Martin’s choreography.

As I noted in my 2024 review, the role of Emma must be one of the most demanding so far in 21st-century British theatre. The emotional range required is huge and that is complicated by Emma’s varying levels of consciousness. Lisa Lambert does an heroic job of portraying a character who moves from despair and delusion through anger and rebellion to something resembling normality. Anyone who sees Lambert will be overwhelmed by the braveness of her performance. I, having seen the Denise Gough, the creator of the role, just last year, felt that Gough played Emma’s emotions as rawer and her grasp on reality as even more tenuous than Lambert does. At the conclusion when Emma has finally got herself together, Lambert’s Emma seemed actually to have achieved her goal, while Gough made Emma’s achievement appear much more fragile so that her parents’ coldness towards her felt even more devastating.

Fiona Reid is masterful as ever in playing three roles – Emma’s Doctor, Emma’s Therapist and Emma’s Mum. Reid succeeds in distinguishing the first two roles more clearly than did Sinéad Cusack in the London production. Reid more fully contrasts the rigour and penchant for irony in the Doctor versus the warmth and earnestness in the Therapist. As Emma’s Mum, Reid is so icy you wonder how Emma could have grown up with her and not been driven to addiction.

It’s wonderful to see Oliver Dennis on stage again after the rapid dispersal of the founding members of the Soulpepper ensemble. Dennis finely contrasts his two roles of Emma’s fellow rehab mate Paul and of Emma’s Dad. Dennis lends Paul such intensity both when he is violent and when he is docile that it’s frightening. He plays Emma’s Dad as rather kindlier than we were led to expect and almost comically unable to express his emotions.

As the two friends Emma makes in rehab, Matthew Gouveia as Foster and Farhang Ghajar as Mark present opposite personalities. Where Gouveia plays Foster as laid-back and unflappable, Ghajar plays Mark as empathetic and concerned. Both show their characters’ façades contradict their inner feelings. Foster’s coolness hides an extreme devotion to his dog, while Mark’s empathy hides his love of order and rules.

The movement chorus – Nickeshia Garrick, Sam Grist, Sarah Murphy-Dyson, Kwaku Okyere and Kaleb Tekeste – is fantastic. Their dance movements may look orgiastic but are in fact precisely controlled. Their function as prop movers is so slickly choreographed, you often don’t see how one scene has changed to another. Their function as members of Emma’s therapy circle reveals them as an ideal ensemble of actors.

When I was exiting the subway a stranger from the train noted I had just seen the play. I asked what he thought and he said, “I’m a twelve-step guy myself, so it hit me really hard”. I would say that the show as directed Diana Bentley and acted by her excellent cast will hit you really hard no matter your background. You learn through the play why addiction is comforting – until it isn’t. You are forced to ask yourself what is the best way to live in a world that increasingly feels chaotic. One of the greatest speeches in the play is Emma’s impassioned speech, beautifully delivered by Lambert, about what acting and theatre mean to her. A play is “life with the boring bits left out”. Emotionally and intellectually compelling, People, Places and Things is the perfect example of what she means.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Louise Lambert as Emma with ensemble, © 2025 Elana Emer; the ensemble, © Barry McClusky; Louise Lambert as Emma and Fiona Reid as Doctor, © 2025 Elana Emer.

For tickets visit: www.coalminetheatre.com.