by Aanika Eragam
It is just as the Narrator decides his list of reasons worth living for is actually childish, naïve in fact, that he realizes he is in love. And the woman he loves has etched on a few more reasons to live:
“1000. When someone lends you books.”
“1003. Realising that for the first time someone is occupying your every thought.”
“1004. Finding an opportunity to say this…”
The music swells. The Narrator runs around the stage, buoyed by hope. The audience needs to liven up, he says, and then commands everyone to raise their right hand. For a moment, we all sit with our hands aloft, on the verge of some sort of oath, uncertain what will be asked of us next.
Then he bounds into the crowd, high-fiving everyone in a two-row radius.
That’s the brilliance of Every Brilliant Thing, currently running in London’s West End. A one-person play, it’s remarkable in its vastness, eliding between stand-up and improv. At random, members of the audience are chosen and transformed into several crucial characters including Sam (the lover in question), Mrs. Patterson (a beloved childhood teacher), and Dad (self-explanatory). A rotating cast plays the role of Narrator, helmed by British comedian Lenny Henry, whose credits include the sketch comedy Lenny Henry Show and founding BBC’s charity program Comic Relief. In the aftermath of his mother’s suicide attempt, the show follows this unnamed Narrator from age six into adulthood as he decides to write a list of every brilliant thing worth living for.
Perhaps this premise felt a bit more revolutionary when the play first debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2014 and mental health was slowly unfurling from taboo. Over a decade later, while still undoubtedly relevant, some of the play’s landing points packed less of a punch (“I now realise that it’s important to talk about things,” Henry says in the finale.) More lasting is the incredible execution of the play’s form, as Henry called out a number on the list and somewhere in the crowd, a voice consistently called back.
“516.”
“Winning something!”
“517.”
“Knowing someone well enough to get them to check your teeth for broccoli.”
“521.”
“The word ‘plinth’.”
While the show’s messaging wasn’t novel, it did uphold the promise of its advertising— “life-affirming” by virtue of how alive every moment felt. At one point, the Narrator asked the entire room to get up and dance.
The transformation of the audience members into performers elevated everyone’s investment; we had a part to play after all. In other moments, it felt like a double-edged sword, muting the underlying sentiments of isolation and grief the play was premised on. Henry broke character once, as the elderly gentleman he brought on stage to play Dad kept making the audience laugh with his deadpan delivery. “Come on, man,” he said. “This is supposed to be one of the saddest moments in the play.”
While it was playwright Duncan Macmillan’s command that the house lights remain on for the duration of the play, in this production, the lack of visual variety created a spirit of cheeriness that leaned more into stand-up and less drama. I was left wishing for a shift in tone, for the moments of tragic monologue to be held in their silence. Henry, for all his energy and charisma, felt somewhat unconvincing in the play’s more desolate moments—but it’s hard to tell whether this was the fault of the execution or the setup.
A mere minute after Dad’s improvised wedding toast elicited cheers from the Saturday night crowd, for example, the Narrator revealed that he and Sam are having problems. “We had one argument in particular,” he declares. “Sam suggested that I talk to someone. Professionally.” Coming after the high-energy sequence of their wedding (complete with a walk down the aisle and confetti), this sudden shift, his decade-long isolation that followed, felt hasty. Wait, I thought, when did he become depressed? “Perhaps Sam had been right,” he says. “Perhaps I’d been difficult to live with. Difficult to love.” The Sam we got to know that night, a bubbly woman who couldn’t contain her laughter in every scene she was called to the stage for, felt difficult to square with the hard-edged person he spoke of.
As the adult Narrator seeks advice for his depression, he consults the woman he chose to play Mrs. Patterson. Earlier in the evening, he had commanded her to put her sock on her hand (“When’s the last time that sock was washed?”). The sock became the Narrator’s therapist, and the return to puppetry felt entirely in tune with Macmillan’s project of childhood optimism in the face of grief. A sock puppet to help a hollow man. A list of a million brilliant things to cure his mother’s unbearable sadness. In the brightly lit Soho Theatre, the form met the content. It did feel brilliant—the unity of a dozen voices chiming out reasons to live as an antidote to isolation. “Was I happy?” Henry asks the sock, as if past could be evidence of future. “You were,” the sock answered that night, sturdy as a promise.
