Jeremy Herrin Archives - The Play Podcast

082 – People, Places & Things by Duncan Macmillan

by Douglas Schatz | Jun 20, 2024 | Podcast Episodes

082 – People, Places & Things by Duncan Macmillan

Duncan Macmillan’s play, People, Places & Things, is an unflinching portrait of the real struggle and pain of battling addiction, as well as an exploration of how we seek to define our identity to our self and to anyone else. The play premiered at the National Theatre in 2015, before transferring to the West End the following year, and then on to New York a year later. Denise Gough won awards for her electrifying performance as the disturbed actress, Emma, and as we record this episode she is reprising her role nearly a decade on at the Trafalgar theatre in London’s West End. It is an unforgettable, virtuoso performance: fierce, funny, poignant and technically completely commanding.

Duncan Macmillan was surprised by the play’s initial commercial success, saying “it’s about a difficult person, being difficult to other people who are in a difficult situation!” It is a fascinating, funny and challenging play, and an exhilarating piece of theatre.

The current revival is directed by Jeremy Herrin, who also directed the original production. I am therefore especially delighted to be able to talk in this episode with both the author, Duncan Macmillan, and the play’s director, Jeremy Herrin.

Duncan Macmillan

Duncan Macmillan’s plays include Lungs from 2011, which was revived in 2019 at the Old Vic with Claire Foy and Matt Smith, and then live streamed from the empty auditorium in the early days of Covid in June 2020; his adaptation of 1984 co-written with Robert Icke; People, Places & Things; 2071 (co-written with Chris Rapley); Every Brilliant Thing, with Jonny Donahoe, which was a break-out hit at the Edinburgh Festival in 2014, and which returns to Edinburgh ten years on in 2024; Rosmersholm (adapted from Ibsen); An Enemy of the People (English version of Thomas Ostermeier’s adaptation of Ibsen); City of Glass (adapted from Paul Auster).

We covered Lungs in episode 7 of the podcast: 07 Lungs
We covered An Enemy of the People in episode 77 of the podcast: 077 An Enemy of the People

Recommended Play

Duncan recommended Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris.

Photo by Natasha Krstic-Howe

Jeremy Herrin

Jeremy Herrin has been a director of Live Theatre Newcastle, The Royal Court, and Headlong theatre companies. Highlights of his distinguished career include directing People, Places & Things (National Theatre, West End and New York); Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies for the RSC; James Graham’s plays This House, Labour of Love and Best of Enemies (West End); A Mirror (Almeida and Trafalgar Theatre); Ulster American (Riverside Studios); All My Sons (The Old Vic); The Visit, The Plough and the Stars; Statement of Regret (National Theatre); The Nether, That Face, South Downs, Absent Friends, Death and the Maiden,The Glass Menagerie (West End); The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe); Junkyard, The Absence of War (Headlong); Observe the Sons Marching Towards the Somme (International Tour); Noises Off (Lyric Hammersmith); Haunted Child, The Heretic, Kin, Spur of the Moment, Off the Endz, The Priory, Tusk Tusk, The Vertical Hour (Royal Court); The Moderate Soprano (Hampstead); Marble (The Abbey Dublin); The Family Reunion (Donmar Warehouse).

Jeremy is a founding director of Second Half Productions.

Recommended Play

Jeremy recommended The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt.

We have footnotes for this episode …

The Footnotes to our episode on Duncan Macmillan’s devastating and humane portrait of addiction, People, Places & Things, include observations on Emma’s propensity to lie, and on how she uses her intelligence to resist the prescribed treatments and to delude herself.

Footnotes for Patrons

Become a Patron!

Since I launched The Play Podcast in April 2020, I have managed to eschew any form of advertising or sponsorship, and I would like to continue to produce the podcast without doing so. I therefore invite you to help me to continue to make the podcast by becoming a Patron. Additional benefits available to Patrons include Footnotes on the plays covered in the podcast, as well as early access to The Play Review. For details click here Thank you very much for listening and for your support. Douglas

The Texts

If you are interested in buying the play text or other related books, we’d be delighted if you choose to purchase them from our selected partners Bookshop.org and Blackwell’s. Not only will you be supporting independent booksellers, we will also earn a small commission on every book you purchase, which helps to keep the podcast going. Click on the cover to buy from our chosen partner. Thank you.

115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg

Oct 6, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

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August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.

Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.

Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.

114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

Sep 22, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

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William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.

I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.

113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Aug 24, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.

As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.

080 – Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill

by Douglas Schatz | May 10, 2024 | Podcast Episodes

Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
April 2024
Photo by Johan Persson

080 – Long Day’s Journey into Night, by Eugene O’Neill

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Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical magnum opus Long Day’s Journey into Night presents a single day and night in the lives of the troubled Tyrone family, during which they conduct a torturous and tragic self-examination. It is a relentlessly bitter and mournful round robin of recriminations and self-dramatization, written as an act of personal confrontation with O’Neill’s own family demons. As the title suggests, the play is long and taxing. It is raw and despairing, but also lyrical, and ultimately heartbreakingly moving.

Eugene O’Neill finished writing Long Day’s Journey into Night in April 1941, but because of the personal revelations it contained he gave explicit instructions that the play was not to be published until 25 years after his death, and more extraordinarily, that it should never be performed on stage. However, within three years of his death his widow allowed both the publication of the play, and the first productions at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and then on Broadway, where it received ecstatic reviews and won the fourth Pulitzer prize of O’Neill’s career.

It has been staged many times since, filmed on a number of occasions, and become a staple of educational curricula, particularly in North America. As we record this episode, a powerful new production is playing in the West End of London, with Brian Cox, most recently renowned as the ruthless patriarch Logan Roy in the TV series Succession, and Patricia Clarkson leading the cast.

I am very excited and privileged to be able to talk to the London production’s director, Jeremy Herrin, about this monumental play.

Jeremy Herrin

Jeremy Herrin has been a director of Live Theatre Newcastle, The Royal Court, and Headlong theatre companies. Highlights of his distinguished career include directing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies for the RSC, with transfers to London and New York; as well as James Graham’s plays This House, Labour of Love and Best of Enemies in London.

Jeremy also directed the original production of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things at the National Theatre, in the West End and New York, and he is directing a revival of the play at the Trafalgar theatre in London, opening in May 2024.

Recommended Play

Jeremy recommended People, Places & Things by Duncan Macmillan.

We have footnotes for this episode …

The Footnotes to our episode on Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus Long Day’s Journey into Night contain observations on the publication and first production of the play, James Tyrone the actor, Mary’s preoccupation with the past, and O’Neill’s dramatic form.

Footnotes for Patrons

Become a Patron!

Since I launched The Play Podcast in April 2020, I have managed to eschew any form of advertising or sponsorship, and I would like to continue to produce the podcast without doing so. I therefore invite you to help me to continue to make the podcast by becoming a Patron. Additional benefits available to Patrons include Footnotes on the plays covered in the podcast, as well as early access to The Play Review. For details click here Thank you very much for listening and for your support. Douglas

The Texts

If you are interested in buying the play text or other related books, we’d be delighted if you choose to purchase them from our selected partners Bookshop.org and Blackwell’s. Not only will you be supporting independent booksellers, we will also earn a small commission on every book you purchase, which helps to keep the podcast going. Click on the cover to buy from our chosen partner. Thank you.

115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg

Oct 6, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.

Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.

Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.

114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare

Sep 22, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.

I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.

113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Aug 24, 2026 | Podcast Episodes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.

As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.

Jeremy Herrin

by Douglas Schatz | May 9, 2024 | Contributor

Jeremy Herrin

Jeremy Herrin has been a director of Live Theatre Newcastle, The Royal Court, and Headlong theatre companies.

Highlights of his distinguished career include directing People, Places & Things (National Theatre, West End and New York, and the revival at Trafalgar Theatre); Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies for the RSC; James Graham’s plays This House, Labour of Love and Best of Enemies (West End); A Mirror (Almeida and Trafalgar Theatre); Ulster American (Riverside Studios); All My Sons (The Old Vic); The Visit, The Plough and the Stars; Statement of Regret (National Theatre); The Nether, That Face, South Downs, Absent Friends, Death and the Maiden,The Glass Menagerie (West End); The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe); Junkyard, The Absence of War (Headlong); Observe the Sons Marching Towards the Somme (International Tour); Noises Off (Lyric Hammersmith); Haunted Child, The Heretic, Kin, Spur of the Moment, Off the Endz, The Priory, Tusk Tusk, The Vertical Hour (Royal Court); The Moderate Soprano (Hampstead); Marble (The Abbey Dublin); The Family Reunion (Donmar Warehouse).