I can now speak about my abuse and addiction

Denise Gough's five-star performance in People, Places Things has stunned critics once again. She tells ick Curtis about trauma and reprising her role

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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. It opened again 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 twenties. "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."