If it’s not typically mentioned in the same breath as the blockbuster likes of ‘Fleabag’ or ‘Baby Reindeer’, ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ is – in its own quieter way – one of the great modern Edinburgh Fringe hits. While it only had a modest screen adaptation (a 2016 live performance artfully captured for HBO), Duncan Macmillan’s play has gone on to be performed all over the world, in a multitude of languages, from Arabic to Spanish to Mandarin.
And as it returns to the Paines Plough Roundabout for 2024 in a tenth anniversary production – directed by Macmilllan himself though it’s essentially a straight revival – it’s truly not hard to see the appeal.
Bittersweet and light on its feet, original star and co-writer Jonny Donahoe is back as the unnamed protagonist, a man who has made it his life’s work create a list of… every brilliant thing that exists in the world, a task he began as a child in response to his mum’s first suicide attempt – to give her reasons to live for – but stretches out into his adulthood: an emotional crutch, an obsession, an in joke and more.
At heart it’s a play about living with depression and it’s less about the idea that the list actually ‘works’ than that it’s a way of communicating love and care between those who struggle to talk about the pain they’re going through; that some things can only be addressed obliquely.
It’s not as exquisitely wrought as Macmillan’s masterpiece ‘People, Places and Things’, but it’s not really meant to be: ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ is above all a communal endeavour. It isn’t simply a gimmick that audience members are given pages of the list to read out on cue: it’s a sign of how we’re all bound together, how we’re all connected in this. At one point I handed over the pen I was using to write notes to stand in as a syringe being used to put down a dog, which felt a bit on the nose but I was happy to be part of it all.
Of course Donahoe does the heavy lifting, and he’s superb: part ebullient host, part wide-eyed child, part dazed adult not sure how he got here. But if it was him performing to 600 people (the capacity of the theatre ‘People, Places and Things’ is currently playing in London) it would lose its intimacy, its communality. So maybe ‘Every Brilliant Thing’ will never break out of the Fringe – or fringes, anyway. But what a gift it is that it keeps coming back – bring on the next decade of revivals.