Every Brilliant Thing

39658 original

Well, this is sweet. A six-year-old whose mother attempts suicide tries to re-connect her with happiness by listing, literally, every briliant thing. "Ice cream...things with stripes...laughing so hard you shoot milk out of your nose." They are crystallised insights into what makes a six-year-old heart leap with joy; and a perfect lense to completely misunderstand mental illness through. For how, really, can a six-year-old understand a hard-wired preponderence for insoluable despair?

Or, a teenager? Or a young adult? This could seem like a tired conceit – there's only so many cute things you can get away with listing. But it works because it grows with the character. The items chosen reflect changing priorities, a growing imagination, and a growing sense of the ironic futility of the task. "Hairdressers who listen to what you want," is number...I forget. As our hero falls in love, he tries and fails to grasp it with his list – circling around the point in the same beautiful but incomplete way. The breaking point of this Syphean task (we get to 1 million), is in "the difference between feeling happy and joyful". In a sense, Every Brilliant Thing tries to understand mental illness by homing in on what it is not.

Played in the round, this is anchored by a sweet, comic performance from Jonny Donnahoe (of comedy duo Jonny and the Baptists fame) – assisted by, well, us, the audience. We read numbered items from his list. We provide him with props. Some of us even play important characters. In this sense we're part of the task, sharing in its moments of joy and patterns of incomprehension.