"Every Brilliant Thing". Pilch

I’ve only seen a trailer for the HBO screen version of the original production of Every Brilliant Thing. So it’s not really fair to compare. But based on that trailer, I’d have to say that what I saw tonight at The Pilch was better.

Why? Because tonight Leah Aspden walked a tightrope between depression and hilarity, while balancing tragedy and comedy in her hands, without ever falling off into sentimentality. It was a remarkable, funny, powerful and moving performance. And it was, both emotionally and literally, truly involving.

Duncan MacMillan’s play confronts the terrible issue of maternal suicide (or, to be more precise, suicidality – the tendency to submit to suicidal intent) and its impact on a child. Not exactly the stuff of humour, you might think. But Lydia Free’s brilliant and deceptively simple production swings you from laughter to horrified silence with incredible ease, like a toddler falling off a swing. It’s a one-actor show, but Aspden cajoles the whole audience into taking part. And whenever it might potentially veer into schmaltz, she has the wit and tough perkiness to keep it straight.

In fact there’s a no-nonsense flavour to the whole production. The seating is made up of chairs that have been dragged in from anywhere. The prop piano has to be held up by a couple of audience members. Even Aspden herself is on stage just chatting to people – not in character, just as herself – until the moment the play starts. This might look casual, but the effect is to give the entire event a relaxed feeling of natural warmth. By the time it starts you feel like you’re with a bunch of friends. And this has the knock-on benefit that, when the time comes for members of the audience to join in the action, there’s no self-consciousness, and they make great contributions. Tonight’s ‘Dad’ could conceivably have been to a few rehearsals himself (he hadn’t, I checked), and the beloved schoolteacher’s conversation with Aspden was so perfect it could have been scripted – but at the same time its perfection was purely down to the fact that it wasn’t scripted.

The ‘brilliant things’ that the character (never named) compiles over their life are truly joyous because, when you hear each of them, you immediately see their brilliance. And by the end, it’s fair to say that we were willingly converted into a fifty-person support group.

The play does not simply tell a story. It makes serious points about the way traumatic events echo through the lives of those affected, and it turns a critical light on uninformed media coverage. But can I just say in response to one line, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is not ‘shit’.

So… go and see it! I was still tingling when I came out, from the strange and wonderful sensation of laughing while wiping away tears of sadness. Surely one thing that earns a place on the list is Every Brilliant Thing.