Review: Daniel Radcliffe Invites Us to Cherish Every Brilliant Thing

Midway through Every Brilliant Thing, a solo show making its Broadway premiere with Daniel Radcliffe, the performer cites advice from the Samaritans on how to report on suicides as sensitively as possible. As the performer notes, these humane suggestions contrast with the more sensationalistic ways the media often portrays them. In that and other brief moments, Duncan Macmillan’s play shines a genuinely illuminating light on a dark corner of mental health that many will feel uncomfortable exploring. Alas, you’ll have to wade through a host of cutesy audience-participation gimmicks and wannabe-uplifting sentimentality to reach such isolated pearls of insight.

Radcliffe plays an unnamed figure whose mother has just tried to commit suicide when they’re  only 7 years old (nonbinary pronouns are used since the role can be played by people of any gender). It’s during this moment—partly inspired by an earlier experience with the death of their dog, Indiana Bones—that they come up with an idea to try to cheer her up: a list of items, physical, emotional, and otherwise, that bring joy. At first, they write these items down on Post-it notes and place them all over the house for her to see. They keep adding to the list as they get older, and it starts to feel therapeutic for them, too, as they grapple with both the challenges of everyday living and fear of their own depression similarly swallowing them up.

Macmillan, however, is aiming for universal import rather than simply exploring these characters. One of the keys to how he goes about that in Every Brilliant Thing lies in the casting of its sole performer. Since Jonny Donahoe (who gets a co-writing credit) first performed the piece more than a decade ago (a filmed version of which aired on HBO in 2016 and is available to stream on HBO Max), actors of various ages, ethnicities, sexualities, and socioeconomic backgrounds have taken on the role all over the world. This production, directed by Macmillan and Jeremy Herrin, is a transfer of a hit West End engagement that featured a rotating cast of performers including Lenny Henry, Ambika Mod, Sue Perkins, Minnie Driver, and Donahoe himself.

Just as crucial to the universalizing aim of Every Brilliant Thing is its use of audience participation. Not only are audience members enlisted to yell out various items on the list when prompted, but the performer also engages individuals to role-play as their father; their significant other, Sam; and a grade-school teacher with a sock puppet, among others. Most of the audience participation is voluntary; before each performance, Radcliffe goes through the Hudson Theatre distributing cards with list items and chatting with those who wish to partake. If nothing else, such carefully planned chance interactions offer a test of a performer’s improvisatory capabilities. At the performance I attended, Radcliffe’s urging of a couple of volunteers to temporarily surrender books they were reading led him to have to feign ignorance of recent literary and television sensation Heated Rivalry, since that was one of the books offered to him.

Such gambits are admirable in their attempt to implicate all of us in the potentially crippling, even fatal, spiral of depression. But there are also virtues in allowing an audience to locate the universal in the specific and thus dig a little for their uplift. In trying to make the casting of its performer inclusive, Macmillan has also dampened the kind of psychological inner life that might have made for a much richer experience. The audience participation also proves to be a double-edged sword, threatening to detract from the gravity of the issues being explored and drown the show in whimsy.

It helps to have Radcliffe as our guide, bringing reserves of energy and charm to the onstage musings and proving to be a nimble improviser during his interactions with audience members. (Some of those audience members sit on a stage that approximates the in-the-round arrangement of previous smaller productions; Vicki Mortimer is credited with both set and costume design). Plus, whether intentional or not, our association with Radcliffe as the original onscreen Harry Potter brings an additional layer of poignancy to the show’s chronicle of a youth attempting to work through his evolving impressions of sadness and death as he grows up. But even Radcliffe’s seemingly effortless charisma can’t entirely disguise a shallow, generic feeling at the heart of Every Brilliant Thing. For all its noble intentions, this mixture of TED Talk, improv, and interactivity adds up to little more than a glorified “it gets better” homily.