Lenny Henry is the first in a string of big names to headline this life-affirming, memory-evoking piece of theatre that feels like a warm hug.
The brilliant thing about Every Brilliant Thing is that it’s a one-person show that actually features around 600 people. There’s one performer on stage – currently either Lenny Henry or Jonny Donahoe – and 600 or so in the audience and there’s no fourth wall between them.
The house lights stay on and at the very least you’ll be asked to stand up or clap along to an Isley Brothers song. Otherwise, you’ll be asked – during the pre-show bit where the actor respectfully approaches members of the crowd to see if they’re willing – to read out one of the many brilliant things on the protagonist’s list. Or if you’re really game you’ll be recruited into playing either a vet, a dad or a kindly school librarian (so long as you’re wearing socks, because he or she is required to produce a sock puppet).
It sounds gimmicky, but it isn’t. The breaking down of barriers between performer and audience is all in service to a life-affirming, memory-evoking piece of theatre that feels like a warm hug despite its dark subject matter.
Written by Duncan Macmillan and co-created by Donahoe, who originally performed it at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014, it’s a comedy about suicide, which sounds like an oxymoron. But it’s also about childhood optimism, memory and nostalgia, resilience, the comfort of strangers and how it’s sometimes OK to not be OK as the seven-year-old at its centre vows to make a list of all the things worth living for after their mother tries to kill herself.
The list starts out small but grows and grows as they navigate adolescence and adulthood, with so many relatable items on the roster that I defy you not to be deeply moved when inevitably some of them strike a personal chord.
I saw Lenny in the lead and he was fantastic – a seasoned stand-up skillfully volleying back and forth between himself and the audience, good-naturedly ribbing the ones who flubbed their lines and beaming with surprise and delight when they went above and beyond what he’d subtly asked them to do.
He’ll be in the show until the end of the month, then returns for a stint from the end of September. Others taking the role across the run include Ambika Mod and Sue Perkins (both alternating in September) and Minnie Driver (from mid-October until it closes on 8 November).
Every Brilliant Thing is such a living, breathing piece of theatre that it’d be worth raiding the piggy bank to go more than once to see what each of them brings to it and what, in turn, we bring to them.
Every Brilliant Thing is at @sohoplace until 8 November.
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