Recovery depends on honesty, but Emma – not her real name – lies for a living. Duncan Macmillan’s searing play, getting a well-deserved West End transfer from the National, complicates the familiar story of addiction and rehab by making its protagonist an actress. The dissociation, self-delusion and pathological deceit that frequently accompany the disease are reframed by this sometimes dizzying metatheatricality, which, in Jeremy Herrin’s vivid Headlong staging, plunges us into the abyss.
