Trafalgar Theatre

‘People, Places and Things’ in 2024 is never going to be quite the same thing as ‘People, Places and Things’ in 2015: so much of the thrill of its initial ascent lay in being there to watch actor Denise Gough explode in stature from relative unknown to all-time great right in front of our eyes. As Jeremy Herrin’s original production of Duncan Macmillan’s smash addiction drama returns, it’s now a given that Gough – among other things now a fixture of the ‘Star Wars’ universe – will deliver a phenomenal performance. And she does!  She is beyond tremendous as Emma, a booze-and-drugs-addled actor who we first meet slurring her way through a performance of ‘The Seagull’ before flaming out at a club night and checking herself into a rehab centre. Disorientated and pugnacious, as she dries out and gathers her wits she begins to rail against the 12-step programme and the very idea of sobriety, essentially declaring her self-destructive lifestyle to be an appropriate response to the pointlessness of human existence. Gough is magnificent and absurd in equal measure, a performance that’s simultaneously high comedy and high tragedy. Still, the third time around I felt complacent enough about Gough’s greatness that some of the play’s flatter bits bothered me a little more. While Herrin’s kinetic production – with its pounding beats and screaming clones of Emma – is rarely boring, it does somewhat bog down once Emma sobers up and reluctantly agrees to therapy. Her newfound rehab bestie Mar

This review is from so long ago our records don’t really account for it, though we’re pretty sure it was 2006. ‘The 39 Steps’ returns in 2024 with – unsurprisingly – a different cast. There's a wonderful '80s comedy sketch where one extremely effete doctor turns to another and declares, 'I learnt everything I know about women from the novels of John Buchan.' Though Buchan was aggressively heterosexual, his emphasis on a world where a chap's upper lip was as stiffly starched as his collar meant there was little room for ladies – pleasant creatures though they were – in his tales of intrigue. When Hitchcock adapted Buchan's 'The 39 Steps', however, he introduced a love interest in a version which Buchan later conceded was better than his own. In this stage version, Patrick Barlow has continued the honourable tradition of mucking around with Buchan's original, keeping the love interest (now elegantly played by new cast member Rachel Pickup) and adding a whirligig of self-conscious theatrical effects in a production where four actors evoke everyone from lingerie salesmen to a housekeeper who screams like a steam-train. Charles Edwards is Richard Hannay, a gentleman with irony in his soul, able to avert disaster with the merest twitch of a courteous eyebrow – until a mysterious female foreigner is stabbed in his apartment. His flight from London to the Highlands to trace her killer and evade arrest himself is depicted with DIY ingenuity through such props as hatstands which double

Although only an actual time traveller would have realised the significance at the time, there’s something delightful about the fact that Jodie Whittaker’s last stage outing in London was in the National Theatre’s ‘Antigone’ – she was in the title role, and one Christopher Eccleston played her uncle Creon as a slick, Blair-like politician.  Fun as it would be to leave her stage career with this team up of the once and future Timelords, Whittaker is very much an ex-Doctor now, and it’s time for her to knuckle down to some stage work. ‘The Duchess’ is playwright-director Zinnie Harris’s 2018 adaptation of John Webster’s Jacobean gorefest ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ – the same basic story about how the titular heroine is brought down by envious men, but pointedly modernised, with the Duchess’s character now a bit more than ‘virtuous’. Further casting is TBC, but clearly we know who the main attraction will be.