Denise Gough: ‘Theater Has the Power to Change People—I See It Every Day’

With High Noon, Gough, who sang soprano from the age of eight through drama school, takes on her first major singing role. “I sang at my ex-boyfriend’s father’s funeral at 22, and I didn’t hit the note because I was really emotional,” she recalls. “I just stopped.” Over a month of workshops, however, she found her voice again—one line at a time, her back to the cast. “Doing this play gave me that gift back,” she says.

This theater turn follows Gough’s 2024 reprisal of her volcanic, Olivier Award-winning part as Emma, an actress and struggling addict in Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things, which debuted in 2015 and shot Gough—who herself had been fighting addiction, working as a waitress and close to giving up on acting altogether—to fame. To witness Gough onstage in this portrayal of addiction at its most unnerving, absurd, slippery, and toxic is mesmerizing. It was era-defining the first time and just as sensational (but not sensationalist) the next. She went on to do Angels in America (and nabbed her second Olivier) in the West End and on Broadway, TV work including Disney’s Andor, and movies like Colette. But theater, she says, is her home.

“I’m used to leading,” says Gough, pulling herself cross-legged on her chair. “Having done People, Places & Things, I need a specific kind of character to fill up all the space that it made in my body. But with how the world is hurting, I also wanted some time to come into a beautiful, soft space every day.”

When marches for Palestine began in central London while she was in the theater, Gough’s friends would send photos of her face on the show’s billboard, surrounded by Palestinian and Irish flags. “If I was playing something heavier and still trying to be active in this community, I think my nervous system would be shot,” says Gough. (Even a cursory look at her Instagram makes clear just how vocal she’s been about the war in Gaza.) “It’s important to look after yourself while the world burns.”

“As an artist, I think of Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and people who reflected back to society what was happening. That’s the role of an artist,” she goes on. “Speaking out, I don’t want to lose what I’ve earned, but equally I don’t know how I would sleep at night if I didn’t say anything. How do you not say anything? But loads of people don’t say anything.” During her run, she’s also been doing voice-over work for a documentary about medical workers in Gaza.

All the while, her reverence for the theater has been stronger than ever. If People, Places & Things affirmed anything for Gough, it’s that “theater has the power to change people. I see it every day.”

“People will roll their eyes at that,” she continues, “but I know it because I was on that stage every night. I met the people afterwards, I got letters, I felt it in the room. For me, it is a shamanic experience.” Watching fellow Irish actor Jessie Buckley take what she sees as theater-style craft and skill to the screen with Hamnet has been moving: “I see film and TV work as quite a technical and intellectual experience—that’s worthy, and just as valuable—but Jessie is so possessed by the emotions, and when that meets her craft, it is special.”