Addicts and actresses lie
One of the facts that we identify about Emma early on and which becomes a running theme through the play, is that she frequently does not tell the truth. As an addict she has become accustomed to hiding the truth from others, and from herself. She continues to put up a front of lies that she can hide behind, including perversely even to those who are trying to help her. The inconsistency in her own name through the play is a telling symbol of her deceit. We are alerted straightaway when she tells the nurse on arriving at the rehab clinic that her name is Nina, the character in The Seagull that we have just seen her playing. She also uses the fact that she is required repeatedly to adopt different roles as an actress to justify her changeable identity; as she says, “Truth is difficult when you lie for a living”. It may be a real-life trope that some actors confess to being more comfortable being someone other than themselves, but this feels like a smokescreen that Emma employs to deflect others and herself from penetrating or facing the truth.

She calls on the fictional world she knows from the theatre by playfully presenting the plot of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler when asked to tell the group her own story. In our conversation in the podcast, Duncan described two possible outcomes to Emma’s life in the conventional plot of an addict’s life in drama, one being that she is fixed, and the other that she dies. One of these is ironically signalled in Emma’s choice of Hedda as her model, because of course Hedda kills herself at the end of that play.

The inconsistency in Emma’s accounts about the cause of her brother’s death signal a more disturbed psychological hinterland. She first says that he died of a brain haemorrhage, and later that it was an overdose. As an audience this discrepancy heightens our unease about everything that she has said. We expect as she goes deeper into her treatment that she will become more honest with those helping her, so it is a powerful shock to learn from her mother just in passing in the penultimate scene that her real name is not any of those that she has given out at the clinic. “Who are you being now?” is her mother’s pointed challenge. We have naturally invested hope in Emma and her recovery, but at this moment we are left in the same uncertain position as her parents and everyone else she has lied to, unable to trust who she is or what she says. This is the real truth about living with an addict who lies.