The ancient drama of rehab

People Places & Things is a modern play with old stories.

Simon Walsh

Simon Walsh is a communications consultant, journalist and non-stipendiary priest in the Diocese of London.

on a stage a woman kneels on a bed amid frantic action around her.

Denise Gough as Emma.

‘There is no higher power,’ says a character defiantly in People Places & Things, the revival of Duncan Macmillan’s 2015 play about addicts and addiction. It’s an echo from Greek tragedy when anyone denies the gods, and now has a modern ring in all the self-help, self-belief talk of recovery and resolve.

Denise Gough reprises her lead performance as Emma for which, last time around, she swept the board in awards and nominations. It’s easy to see why. She’s on stage almost the entire time, compelling and fluent throughout. The opening scene has her in the white-box modern set wearing a Victorian costume, for her character is an actress in Chekhov’s The Seagull – almost meta, and the first hint and how this a show where realities and identities blur with layers upon layers.

Soon after, Emma (if that is her real name) checks into a rehab unit. She doesn’t feel she has a problem but is there for a break. ‘Drugs and alcohol have never let me down,’ she says at one point. A brisk female doctor in a white coat admits her, played by Sinéad Cusack. A couple of scenes later, Cusack reappears as the clinic’s group therapist. This time she’s full of empathy – barefoot and with a scarf over one shoulder – all herbal tea and sympathy.

But the therapist’s work with her charges is vital. Some even get to ‘graduate’ and host a non-alcoholic party the night before they leave, having successfully stayed the course. Probably not Emma though. She’s too feisty, individually unable to admit her problems, and inevitably she crashes. There’s a naturalistic feel to the production and narrative, even when it jolts into dream-like sequences or bright lights with thumping techno music.

Anyone with experience of an addict or addiction will find it all too familiar. The later scene where Emma returns to the parental home is a crucible of pain, and embodies the play’s title. It concerns ‘the people who can make us relapse, the places which trigger associations, and the things which are the props of the old habits’. And it’s made more complex by the family in grief over the recent, sudden death of Emma’s beloved brother in a freak accident. ‘It should have been you instead’ is the parental curse on this remaining child.

There’s a slow and silent feel to the way it develops. The word inexorable comes to mind, something that cannot be changed or stopped. Like Greek tragedy, the tension is in how this will resolve, and if it will turn out as badly as feared. It does and it doesn’t, which is at least true to the addiction journey.

Jeremy Herrin expertly directs an intensely fine cast: Russell Anthony, Holly Atkins, Ryan Hutton, Malachi Kirby, Danny Kirrane, Paksie Vernon, Kevin McMonagle, Ayò Owóyemi-Peters, Lousie Templeton, Dillon Scott-Lewis. These are nuanced, crafted performances which inhabit Bunny Christie’s versatile, stylish set with presence.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity...

Faith plays at the edges of this work. There are passing references to religion: a ‘bibling grief’, communion wine, the power of prayer. More tears, said St Teresa of Avila, are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones, and this outward expression of a cry for help connotes the spiritual struggle of addicts along with their pity. As the first disciples themselves asked, ‘Teach us, Lord, how to pray.’

Addiction was not something Jesus had much to say about. Healings take place throughout each of the four gospels. The sufferers present with various ailments and of differing origins. For some it is hereditary, others through sin (such as when Matthew records Jesus healing a paralyzed man with the words ‘your sins are forgiven’). At other times there is a clear need for recognition such as when Jesus visits his hometown. He ‘laid hands on a few sick people and cured them’ but otherwise ‘could do no deed of power there… and was amazed at their unbelief’.

These healings, however, do not obviously deal with addiction. The closest connection is probably the examples which deal with demons. The encounter with a man possessed in the land of the Gerasenes, a little earlier, is instructive. Here is someone who ‘lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him anymore, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained but the chains he wrenched apart; and no one had the strength to subdue him’. But Jesus confronts the demon, the ’unclean spirit’, and sends it into a herd of swine ‘numbering about two thousand, which then rushes to the sea and is drowned.

What the healings have in common is the aftermath – a sense of vision restored, stability refound, new clarity. The healed demoniac is found with Jesus, ‘sitting there, clothed and in his right mind’, though the swineherds do not believe it and remain scared. They beg Jesus to leave and the ex-demoniac wants to go with him, but Jesus tells him to stay: ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ He is to give his testimony.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth.

It’s a running debate that lived experience and life identity are now more important than acting ability when it comes to race, sexuality, gender and so on. Denise Gough has given testimony ahead of this run – how as a teenager she fled her native Wexford for London where she fell into homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and was the victim of grooming. She has told her story, with purpose, much as those people who experienced healing and deliverance gave their own account to the Early Church.

Drama at its heart has to be about telling a story and finding a universal truth. The gospels are full of this, with redemption and rehabilitation. Lives changed, sins forgiven, and a new future made possible. There is power in believing, and knowing that when someone might stumble and fall, it is not the end. In fact, it might just be the beginning.

People, Places & Things is on at the Trafalgar Theatre, Whitehall, London, SW1A 2DY, until 10 August 2024.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.