Drawing inspiration from countless interviews and reviews, Nanette Brimmer shares her thoughts about her upcoming play, Every Brilliant Thing.
You’re seven years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s ‘done something stupid’. She finds it hard to be happy. So you start making a list for her. A list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for.
1. Ice Cream
2. Water fights
3. Staying up late and being allowed to watch TV
4. The colour yellow
5. Puppies
This is the premise of the incredible show Every Brilliant Thing, a play about a heavy subject – suicidal depression, but the approach is frolicsome and it was hailed by The Guardian as “the funniest play you’ll see about depression”.
A funny play about depression may seem an oxymoron. Why anyone would want to tackle the job of writing that script, may seem madness, if not insensitive. Yet Duncan Macmillan has done just that. And he has done it well – brilliantly, in fact. He has taken this issue and has been able to completely reverse it and look at it the other way.
I believe audiences will be surprised at the honest and light-hearted manner in which the topic is presented. It is a wise and witty examination of crippling depression and the effect it has on family members. More importantly, it serves as an eye-opener and creates awareness of the condition, as there are a lot of misconceptions that need to be cleared up.
For example, the issue of suicide and depression is often either stigmatised and ignored, or it is almost glamourised in the way it is presented in the media, films or on TV.
Or, in the case of rock stars who have committed suicide – because they were too beautiful to live, they experience the world more vividly than the rest of us, when actually, the reality of it is so much more ordinary, and domestic, and mundane, and everyday. It is something that affects everybody, whether you experience it very directly personally, or whether it’s someone you know or work with, or live with or love. It touches everybody, but it doesn’t seem to be dealt with in a grown-up, responsible, mature way.
Through his script, the playwright wants people to understand that we must not be silent about depression. It is a worldwide health problem that can be cured. But it needs to be recognised and addressed. He believes that, as human beings, we would deal better with the lows in life if we treated them with some humour.
In Every Brilliant Thing, Macmillan’s key interest is in how depression and suicide affect the relatives of sufferers – and in how, even in the darkest times, there is always beauty to be found in the world. His masterstroke is to channel these themes into a play that is poignant and funny, heart-wrenching and hilarious, emotional, yes, but also clever, and surprisingly uplifting.
When it comes to deciding whether to carry on living or to take your own life, that’s something that theatre should be talking about and addressing, conducting research about suicide and realising that the way we talk about it really impacts on other people’s behaviour, and has an effect on the rest of society.
We have a responsibility to talk about it in a responsible way. And, for Macmillan, it seemed the right impulse was to talk about it in a way that wasn’t too bleak, because that’s not accurate, and also try to avoid sentimentality, because that’s not helpful either, but which skirted a really fine line between the two.
So, the impulse became to use comedy. And to use stand-up comedy, and to use audience interaction and to keep the lights up all the way through and share something as a room full of people, as a little community.
His co-writer, British comedian Jonny Donahoe, is of the same opinion. The show is about talking about things that are hardest to talk about and he thinks it’s a wonderful thing to talk about mental health issues with a smile on your face and hopefully make people feel that there is less stigma, and that it’s easier to talk about, and also laugh about, the darkest things in life. “That’s the way you should deal with these sort of things, there’s no other way to look at them other than to laugh at them. We all experience lows, we all experience difficult moments.
A line from the plays says: “If you live a full life and you get to the end of it without ever once feeling crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention. So we’ve got to keep smiling, keep laughing and moving on. We’ve got to find a language and a way of coping with it, and laughter is the absolute best way of doing it.”
In Exit Stage Right’s production of Every Brilliant Thing, Alan Paris uses the art of storytelling to draw in the audience, make them feel at ease, and then make them an intrinsic part of the performance. On a bare stage, in the round, he mingles with the audience as though they were in his own living room. His list of every brilliant thing to live for, born of a child’s fantasy to rescue his mother, continues to grow, and the items become more specific, and by the time the boy has reached adulthood, the list has thousands of entries.
This play is about depression and the lengths we go to for those we love, but it is also about finding reasons to live rather than reasons to die. And those reasons can be as trivial as laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose, and as complex as falling in love. At the end, it leaves you with a feel-good feeling about the lengths we go to for those we love and the capacity to find delight in everyday things.
Every Brilliant Thing is directed by Nanette Brimmer and takes place from November 17 to 19 and 24 to 26 at The Undercroft Café, Old Theatre Street, Valletta. Tickets are available online.
www.ticketline.com.mt