London’s most exciting theatre of 2016 so far is neither one of the smaller producing houses nor a  national flagship venue, but Wyndham’s in the West End. It has so far played host to Florian Zeller’s The Father (from Bath, via the Tricycle), with a central performance which won Kenneth Cranham his first award in nearly 50 years, and now to the National Theatre / Headlong co-production of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places And Things (from the NT’s Dorfman space), in which Denise Gough’s electrifying portrayal will, if there is an atom of justice in this world, make her a star.

Gough, an intelligent and (I imagine without any evidence) slightly prickly actor, plays an intelligent and extremely prickly actor, who is moreover addicted to alcohol and a wide assortment of drugs. Emma (one of several names to which she answers during the play) self-medicates like a fiend. When admitted into rehab, she stubbornly but incisively resists many of the axioms of the twelve-step approach, making her journey that much more fraught… although its ultimate destination is no rose garden either. Gough acts zonked and evasive, withdrawal-jittery, insecure through the process and even more candidly so at its end, for Macmillan rightly pretends no answers about the shortcomings of such a one-size-fits-all curative ideology. More cleverly still, he invokes parallels between the mindset of the addict and that of the actor: the combination of control and surrender, of truth and illusion, the ultimate uncertainty as to where one’s core self is to be found. And Gough is right in there the whole time, potentially laying herself bare (even as she hides herself) and frequently taking the mick out of herself.

Jeremy Herrin’s production and Bunny Christie’s design find visual analogues for Emma’s varying states of mind: the tiled walls seem to flake away, a number of Emma-clones emerge literally out of those walls, and sound designer Tom Gibbons utilises everything from industrial-techno beats to a distorted loop of the opening turn-off-your-phones announcement. To say that the play doesn’t quite match the production is to say that it is merely very good indeed; Gough, however, is magnificent.

Written for the Financial Times.