By Sara Bright
The West End has always been an ecosystem of calculated sentiment. For every flash of genuine, lightning-in-a-bottle genius, there are a dozen glossy revivals and focus-grouped jukebox musicals designed to separate tourists from their cash with maximum efficiency and minimum artistic risk. So, when a production like Every Brilliant Thing achieves not just critical acclaim but global ubiquity, one must ask a rather unfashionable question. Is its success a testament to its profound humanity, or to its inadvertently perfect business model?
With the news that Minnie Driver is the latest famous face to be slotted into the lead role – a rotating celebrity deployment that has included Lenny Henry, Sue Perkins, and Ambika Mod – the play’s West End debut at the sleek, modern @sohoplace feels less like an artistic milestone and more like the maturation of a phenomenally successful start-up. The play itself, a tender and often genuinely moving monologue about a child’s attempt to list all the things worth living for to save his suicidal mother, has been rightly praised for its warmth and its novel use of audience participation. But to focus solely on its therapeutic qualities is to miss the trick. The true, unspoken genius of Every Brilliant Thing is not dramaturgical, but economic. It is perhaps the leanest, most scalable, most ruthlessly efficient piece of theatrical intellectual property ever devised.
Think of it. One actor. No set to speak of. The props are scraps of paper. The supporting cast is the audience itself, drafted into service to read out items from the eponymous list or to play bit-parts like a father or a lecturer. The emotional heavy lifting, the creation of a unique, ‘you-had-to-be-there’ atmosphere, is effectively outsourced to the ticket-holders. They become the unpaid chorus, the living set design, the very emotional scenery against which the star can shine. It’s a theatrical franchise kit, as easily packed up and deployed in a provincial arts centre as it is in a multi-million-pound London venue. It has been performed in over 80 countries not just because its theme is universal, but because its overheads are microscopic. This isn’t a play; it’s the theatrical equivalent of a single-origin coffee pop-up that can be replicated, ad infinitum, anywhere with a room and a willing crowd.
The Catharsis Corporation
Driver’s own comments are telling. She speaks of wanting something ‘new’, ‘unique’, and ‘funny and sad’. She also speaks of the terror of a one-person show, that ‘enormous mountain’. Yet this particular mountain comes with pre-installed pitons and a safety rope woven from the goodwill of hundreds of strangers. It’s a solo flight with an entire airport of ground crew cheering you on. The casting of a Hollywood name like Driver, or a national treasure like Henry, isn’t just about selling tickets. It’s about managing risk. The inherent fragility of the show’s premise – the potential for it all to fall crushingly flat – is buttressed by the audience’s pre-existing affection for the performer. We are not just watching a character; we are rooting for Minnie or Lenny to succeed, and we will do our part to ensure they do. It’s a beautiful, self-fulfilling prophecy. And a very profitable one.
I remember, sometime in the late nineties, sitting through a moribund revival of a once-beloved musical. The sets creaked, the star looked tired, and the whole affair had the whiff of formaldehyde. It was art as taxidermy. Every Brilliant Thing represents the opposite end of the spectrum, and perhaps a more insidious one. This is art as wellness product. It has been packaged and marketed as ‘theatre’s best antidote to depression’. It promises connection, hope, and a shared, ephemeral experience you can ‘talk about on the train home’. It has captured the language and aspirations of the modern self-care industry and bottled it for the stage.
Like a mindfulness app or a subscription to a meditation service, it sells us a feeling of virtuous engagement with difficult emotions. For the price of a Zone 1 ticket, we are offered a neatly contained, 70-minute experience of catharsis. It’s sadness, but a safe, manageable version of it, complete with a hopeful, life-affirming list at the end. We leave feeling not just entertained, but improved. We have participated. We have helped.
Of course, the immediate and plausible counter-argument is that the play genuinely does good. That in a world grappling with a mental health crisis, a piece of theatre that encourages openness, vulnerability, and a focus on life’s small joys is an unequivocal positive, regardless of its commercial structure. For many attendees, the experience is no doubt deeply and sincerely felt. I don’t dispute that. But when does a therapeutic tool, once commercialised and endlessly replicated, become a form of emotional tourism? At what point does the authentic, messy, and deeply personal business of confronting despair become a polished product, flogged to us as an evening’s entertainment?
The play’s journey is analogous to the craft beer revolution. It began with Jonny Donahoe at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 – small, authentic, born of passion and a shoestring budget. It was the artisanal IPA of theatre. Now, it has been acquired by the multinational conglomerates of the West End. The recipe is the same, but it is brewed on an industrial scale, with celebrity hops to guarantee a consistent flavour profile. It’s still a good product, but the charming, slightly chaotic spirit of the original microbrewery is gone, replaced by the slick hum of a global distribution network.
An Uncomfortable Brilliance
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the play’s structure feels like the apotheosis of a certain kind of contemporary individualism, dressed up as its opposite. It centres on a single, charismatic storyteller, whilst the collective – the audience – exists purely to affirm and support their narrative. We are there to hold up their list, to be the benevolent sea in which they can swim. It presents a fantasy of community, one where the group’s sole function is to buoy the individual. It is, in its own gentle way, profoundly self-centred.
What is being sold is not just a story, but a role for us to play within it: the caring, empathetic stranger. For a little over an hour, we get to feel like part of a solution. It’s a potent, appealing offer.
I have no doubt that Minnie Driver will be superb. The play is an actor’s gift, a finely tuned instrument for generating rapport. It is designed to succeed. But its runaway success should give us pause. It reveals a culture so starved of genuine connection that it will pay a premium to have it simulated in a darkened room for an evening. It shows a theatrical landscape where the most viable commercial model is one that minimises artistic risk to near-zero, leveraging celebrity and the free emotional labour of its audience.
The play is brilliant, of that there is no doubt. The question is what kind of brilliance it represents. Is it the brilliance of a poet, capturing a shard of human truth? Or is it the brilliance of an engineer, who has designed a frictionless, perfectly functioning machine? As the curtain rises for Driver, Henry, and the rest, one suspects the answer, uncomfortably, is both.
