After 70 uninterrupted minutes, we emerge knowing something of life under the pall of depression and suicide – and it makes for a funny and moving night out
August 15, 2025 16:25
How do you turn a monologue – the least inviting of theatrical forms which promises one person on a stage talking for over an hour – into a vivid, funny and moving night out?
Playwright Duncan MacMillan does it primarily by writing that rarest of things – a funny play about suicide. Next, you turn a play written for one into a show in which many in the audience participate (do not let this put you off). Thirdly, in this new revival of the work first seen in 2014, you cast a series of star names to perform the play during the run, starting with Lenny Henry and finishing with Minnie Driver. And voilà. The one-person-play is now brimful of more people than it is possible to count while watching it.
It also helps that MacMillan is a fine writer. His People, Places and Things gave Denise Gough the opportunity to deliver a career-defining performance as an addict – twice when you include the recent revival.
With Every Brilliant Thing his collaborator Jonny Donahoe, who is second on the rota of performers, helped turn a classy script into an a live wire evening full of risk buoyed by audience good will.
Henry, and those actors who will later follow him in the role, plays an adult who shares with his audience an almost lifelong coping mechanism for having a mother who is a suicidal depressive.
Since the age of seven he has attempted to persuade her to choose life over death by writing a list of every brilliant thing worth living for. Ice cream, it starts. Wearing a cape, is another.
As the boy becomes an adult the list serves the narrator as much as the parent. Alcohol is in there. So is trusting someone enough for them to check your teeth for broccoli. Being able to take a chip off a plate without having to ask, is another. Each thing in the list has a number which is called out by Henry and is the cue for the audience member who has the corresponding card near their seat to read out the contents.
Henry is in his element in a format that is part play and part stand-up. When two people read out a brilliant thing at the same time because one of them apparently misheard the number, he goodnaturedly starts the scene again. However, under Jeremy Herrin and McMillan’s direction the spirit of the evening ensures no participant is made fun of or made to regret buying a ticket. Not even those Henry gently conscripts into playing his character’s former school head mistress; his father and the girlfriend who became his wife.
By the end of the uninterrupted 70 minutes we know something of life under the pall of depression and suicide. It is no mean achievement to do this in a way that feels life-affirming.
Every Brilliant Thing
@Sohoplace
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