Every Brilliant Thing at a glance

Show
Every Brilliant Thing
Status
Closed at @sohoplace · ended 8 November 2025
Broadway transfer
Daniel Radcliffe at the Hudson Theatre, 21 February – 24 May 2026
Future UK dates
None currently announced
Genre
Play (one-person, audience participation)
Running time
Approximately 1 hour 25 minutes, no interval
Age guidance
12+ (contains discussions of depression and suicide)
Writers
Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe
Directors
Jeremy Herrin and Duncan Macmillan
London cast (in rotation)
Lenny Henry, Jonny Donahoe, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, Minnie Driver
First staged
Paines Plough Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe, 2014
Global reach
Productions in over 80 countries · HBO film adaptation with Jonny Donahoe

Looking back: Every Brilliant Thing at @sohoplace

4.7
★★★★★

LTH Retrospective Rating

Retrospective by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 13 May 2026.

The Verdict

Every Brilliant Thing was, by the time it reached the West End in 2025, already one of the most-produced plays of the last decade. Eleven years of touring, more than eighty countries, an HBO film, and a 2024 anniversary run off-Broadway had given it a life that few new plays achieve. What @sohoplace's West End premiere offered was both a long-overdue London run and a clever piece of programming: a single play, five different performers, each bringing a distinct register to a script that turns out to be remarkably elastic.

The play's central trick is its participation structure. Audience members are handed cards on the way in containing entries from the narrator's list — "ice cream," "the smell of old books," "the way someone you love yawns" — and read them aloud on cue. Some audience members are pulled up to play more substantial parts: the dad, the teacher, the partner. The format makes every performance unrepeatable, and the result depends heavily on the performer's ability to ad-lib with strangers without losing the thread of the script. Lenny Henry, who opened the run, did this with a warmth that drew comparisons to his stand-up; Minnie Driver, who closed it, brought a sharper edge that suited the play's quieter moments.

What Makes It Special

  • The list itself. The narrator's list of brilliant things grows in real time across the play, from a few items written by a seven-year-old to something approaching a million by the end. The cumulative effect — the audience reading the list back, line by line — is the play's quiet emotional engine.
  • Five star performers, one role. Lenny Henry, Jonny Donahoe (the show's co-creator, performing his own writing), Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, and Minnie Driver. Each rotation drew a different audience and produced a meaningfully different show. The booking-the-actor-you-want experience was genuinely novel for a West End run.
  • Duncan Macmillan's writing. Macmillan (People, Places and Things; Lungs; 1984) writes about mental health with a clarity and unsentimentality that has made him one of the most-produced British playwrights of the last decade. Every Brilliant Thing is among his most accessible work.
  • A 75–85 minute running time, no interval. The play is built for emotional intensity to be sustained without break. The pace works.
  • It is, despite the subject matter, a comedy. The Guardian's review years ago called it "one of the funniest plays about depression you'll ever see," and the @sohoplace run earned that line over and over. The play does not treat depression as a private grief to be dignified; it treats it as a fact of life that the people around it have to find ways to live with.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in Every Brilliant Thing?

The narrator is seven years old. Their mother is in hospital — their father has said she has "done something stupid" — and the narrator decides to start a list of every brilliant thing in the world, every single thing worth living for, to leave on her pillow. The list begins: ice cream. Kung fu movies. Burning things. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. Me.

The list grows

The play unfolds as the narrator ages from seven into adulthood and the list grows with them. As a child, the entries are immediate and physical. As a teenager, they get sharper and more rueful. As an adult, they get more specific and more precise — the things that someone who has actually had to think about staying alive includes on a list of reasons to stay alive. The narrator's mother is hospitalised again. And again. The list grows.

The audience as cast

The play's structural conceit is that the audience reads the list aloud, line by line, as the narrator calls out numbers. Other audience members are brought into the action to play key figures in the narrator's life — the disapproving teacher, the long-suffering father, the partner the narrator eventually meets and marries. The casting is unrepeatable; the same scene is played slightly differently every night, depending on who happens to be in seat F12.

The vet scene

One of the play's signature moments is the scene in which the narrator's childhood dog, Sherlock Bones, must be put down. An audience member is pulled up to play the vet. The scene is almost always funny — strangers do not usually expect to be asked to mime a euthanasia — and almost always becomes unexpectedly moving. It is the play in microcosm: comedy, vulnerability, kindness, all in the same five minutes.

The closing

The list, by the end, is approaching a million. The narrator has not solved depression — not theirs, not their mother's, not their own — but they have built the documentary record of a life worth being inside. The play closes with the audience reading the final entries together. It is, in the end, an unmistakably life-affirming piece of theatre. That is the entire point of it.