REHAB, billed as an ‘authentic dark comedy exploring addiction, is more or less what it says on the tin. Creator Elizabeth Cracroft, who also performs onstage as ‘Quinn,’ created the show to help humanise people struggling with drug and alcohol problems, based on her lived experience. The ensemble cast’s performances are improvised on the night but improvised is not to be mistaken with unprepared. The setting of an inpatient rehab centre, attention to real-world research on addiction and recovery, and the work the performers have done to develop their characters help coordinate the performance, with ‘Reg’ (Mark Scott) providing additional on-stage direction as the service-provider-cum-ringmaster. 

In practice, REHAB feels like a bit of a blend between feeling like a window into a drug counselling group, an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway? and a scripted drama about recovery. Sometimes the lines between this were sharper and other times more blended, as performers found or struggled to find their rhythm in various scenes. 

In the tradition of improv performance, these scenes had set conceits that helped or hindered in various ways. The large group scenes, being an essential hallmark of drug counselling settings, certainly had their moments, but coordination between the performers suffered, and group sessions were rapidly divided into rapid-fire short interactions between fewer performers. The bulk of the comedy comes from riffing on the tensions between a bunch of adults from various walks of life (with a few challenging personalities) confined, bringing to mind schoolyard drama. The early scenes clearly served the role of generating ideas that would be riffed on throughout and consequently tended towards simple gags that became running jokes, but as we approached the end of the show some surprisingly well-earned moments had the whole audience laughing.

Among the ensemble cast, three characters are selected as the focus of that night’s performance. They are given additional scenes and licence to tell their particular story. The monologues given to the focus characters and the scenes with just two characters were more traditionally theatrical. Space was made to properly explore the characters through how they related, and a few scenes really started to hit their stride. In places this brushed up against the genre, where lighting would begin to fade out a scene right as a performer hit on a rich vein of inspiration. 

Paul Paice as ‘Gus’ was by far the standout performance of opening night. As one of the focus characters he told us a story of a man who had grown up inundated with drugs and alcohol at home, had a child at a young age, abandoned it, and now seeks to get sober in order to assume custody of his granddaughter now that his daughter is incarcerated. This didn’t put him above mooning out the window or leaving his used underwear lying around, though these elements were discussed rather than shown. Paice’s performance of Gus embodied the tension between being a light-hearted, charming person and somebody who has experienced and inflicted a lot of suffering. Playing off a younger Jesse (Zoe Courtney) as a newer entrant to the rehab facility winding him up with a pedantic approach to setting the table, Gus’s anger-management response played with the tension between the usefulness and absurdity of therapeutic practice. 

I’m unqualified to say how well REHAB might represent the addiction inpatient experience. By its nature, it’s hard to say anything definitive as any other night a radically different iteration of the show may be on offer. On the particular night it shied a little much from the challenges of addiction and recovery for my liking, but it did a thorough job of painting addiction as an experience shared by people from all walks of life and was on the whole an entertaining spectacle.

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