Broke and briefly homeless, Irish actress Denise Gough used to weep outside the London playhouses where she couldn’t get a job. Now a 20ft image of her face is emblazoned across the Trafalgar Theatre on Whitehall as she reprises her barnstorming role as chaotic addict Emma in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things.
The play made her name at the National Theatre in 2015, catapulting her from impecunious obscurity into the theatrical big time and a TV career embracing Star Wars spin-off Andor and thrillers Who is Erin Carter? and Too Close. People, Places & Things returned last week and I can confirm lightning does strike twice. It’s a five-star show and Gough is magnificent.
There are other layers of déjà vu here. I interviewed Gough in 2012 when she was a superb but struggling actress, nominated for this newspaper’s Emerging Talent award at the age of 32. Then again in 2017 after she had taken PPT to the West End and New York, earned an Olivier award and a Tony nomination, and was about to win a second Olivier as a valium-addicted Mormon housewife in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the National. Back then, she’d hinted at experiences of trauma and dependency that mirrored Emma’s in PPT.
Today she says she moved from County Clare to London aged 15 and started using alcohol and drugs to block out the experience of being groomed from the age of 13 and raped at 14 by a man in his 20s. “The act happened twice, and then I was broken,” she says. At the time she thought it was love; now she knows it was child abuse.
“Though the worst thing that happened to me was not with that man, but with the nun [at her convent school] who laid the groundwork for me to believe there was something in me that meant I was going to be treated that way by men.”
Back in 2017, she says, “I was skirting around [the subject] because my life was changing so immeasurably. The play was such a success, and suddenly I felt like I was everywhere and it was quite overwhelming. I had done seven years of recovery [from substances] by then, but I hadn’t tackled the whys of it all.”
She started reading about trauma, particularly the works of Gabor Maté, and realised she had internalised a lot of self-blame. Therapy helped, as did talking about the abuse to her shocked family; her father was an electrician, her mother a marriage counsellor, and she has 10 siblings including a heart surgeon, a doctor and the actress Kelly Gough. She can talk about the abuse and addiction publicly now, she says, because she’s speaking from “the wisdom, not the wound”.
Still, you’d think that People, Places & Things risked reopening scars, with its graphic depictions of drug taking, self-harm, and the lies and evasions to which addicts are prey. Plus it’s a hugely physically demanding part for a woman who is now 44, albeit one who has been clean for 17 years. “It’s weirdly easier,” she says. “The marathon of the play is so clear to me and I feel safe in the performance and in the writing.”
Nine years on, she thinks society in general has “a deeper understanding and I think a deeper acceptance of addiction in all its forms. So it’s not just a play about alcohol and drugs, it’s about a lack of connection, especially connection to oneself.”
Macmillan has tweaked the script slightly to include references to Brexit and the pandemic, but it remains broadly, eerily apt as originally written. Gough quotes lines about picking up one’s phone and seeing “pictures of dead children next to adverts for skincare” and “the ethical gymnastics it takes just to pretend that everything is normal”.
She recently returned to social media after many years’ abstinence and has been deluged with images from Gaza and Ukraine. One of her sisters in Ireland took in two Ukrainian women a week after Russia attacked, while Gough was appearing in Portia Coughlan at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. “Two women just arrived, with three children, a cat and just their handbags between them,” says Gough. “They’d been given two days’ notice to leave. Imagine that.”
When we met in 2017, she made a point of describing herself as an “economic immigrant”, who came to London for a better life, relied on state support, and was now giving back. It was her way of countering racist, isolationist rhetoric, which has only increased. “Now it’s horrific,” she says. Is she hopeful a forthcoming Labour government might change the music? “I don’t know. I just don’t trust anyone. People change when they get into power.”
She talked back then about being belittled by directors — since 2017 was also the start of the #MeToo movement I ask if she was harassed as well. “No, my own experience of child abuse kept me safe. Because my antenna for that is so finely honed.”
Her sense of justice and late-won clout has led her, she says, to speak up about any form of mistreatment on set, particularly of film crews. “When you come through what I came through, you become very aware of taking care of other people,” she says. “It can be exhausting because suddenly you’re hyper vigilant on checking that everyone is OK. And you think the world is your responsibility.”
Between Angels in America and Portia Coughlan, Gough was in “the wilderness of TV for a long time”. Two big BBC shows, Guerilla and Paula, that she got off the back of People, Places & Things, didn’t live up to their early promise (my assessment, not hers), though Too Close and Who is Erin Carter? were better. One potential blockbuster, a pilot for a Game of Thrones prequel Bloodmoon, was axed in favour of House of the Dragon.
“But that worked out really well,” she says. “I mean, it’s notoriously muddy, Game of Thrones, and cold, and it’s shot at night. So I thought maybe I wasn’t meant to be in a big franchise. Then along came Tony Gilroy and Star Wars.”
Andor, the prequel to Rogue One, was one of the better spin-offs in the Star Wars universe thanks partly to the quality of Gilroy’s writing but also to Gough’s chilling performance as Empire officer Dedra Meero. She had a whale of a time filming it (“it was all my favourite actors, in space!”) and is tickled that she has been 3D-scanned for an action figure.
“And it bought me a house,” she says. After renting in west London for two years to be close to the Andor sound stage, she has just purchased her first home in Bethnal Green. “My street is a mix of old cockney Londoners like my neighbour who was born in my bedroom 82 years ago, and then a huge Muslim community further down,” she says.
Do you share the house with anyone, I ask? “Mind your own business,” she smiles. “I’ve had a lot of relationships but I’m also good without one, you know?”
One of her longest relationships is with People, Places & Things, of course. Does she plan to revisit the role of Emma every decade or so, as Mark Rylance hopes to do with the part of Rooster Byron in Jerusalem. Gough shakes her head. “Emma has to be in her late 30s,” she says. “I think my body has maybe a year left of her, then she’s gone. Next time I’ll be playing her mother.”
After Gough leaves I chat to Duncan Macmillan about his experience of reviving his greatest hit with the actress who created it. “It’s one of the luckiest things to happen in my career,” he says.
“I wrote a play with a big, barnstorming central part, confident we’d get someone who’d be amazing. But I wasn’t banking on getting the greatest actress of her generation at a time when her career needed a role like this.”
He confirms that he and director Jeremy Herrin offered Gough the role immediately after her first audition, when she snorted a huge line of sugar off a table. “From that moment on it’s been a privilege to watch her.” I’ll second that.
