Steve Rodgers in Every Brilliant Thing. Photo: Brett Boardman
Every Brilliant Thing has returned to Belvoir St, with Steve Rodgers as the Narrator of a raw, gentle and honest story that dares to speak about an issue that has touched – or will touch – nearly every one of us: mental health.
It is not a true story, but it is authentic. It starts with Rodgers as a confused and frightened seven-year-old. His mother is in hospital because, as his father puts it, ‘she has done something stupid’.
She had tried to take her life.
The seven-year-old attempts to make sense of this and also to ease his mother’s depression by creating for her a list of all the best things in the world. Everything worth living for, whether that be ice-cream (No 1 on his list) or water fights or the colour yellow. When his mother comes back from hospital, he puts the list on her pillow. It’s returned, but he knows it has been read because his spelling has been corrected.
Every Brilliant Thing is not really a one-person show because Rodgers involves the audience. As director Kate Champion observes in the program, it ‘is almost not a play. Its form is stripped down to the essentials which allows the simple act of communion with others to define its nature and ultimate purpose. It doesn’t aim to give simple solutions or feel-good remedies but instead suggests we deeply consider how we talk about suicide, how we treat the loved ones of someone who has died by suicide, and how the media reports on it.’
Back on stage, life goes on and the list grows. The mother’s depression recurs. The father doesn’t like to discuss it; he takes refuges in music or silence. When the mother is once again hospitalised, the now 17-year-old Narrator doesn’t cope as well as the seven-year-old did. He is angry, but what to do with that anger? Living with this sort of fear is a silent struggle, often completely unacknowledged by the outside world and suppressed by those experiencing it.
‘We are all subconsciously affected by the behavior of our peers.’ One of many resonant and memorable lines from Every Brilliant Thing. Why wouldn’t the Narrator worry that he too will feel suicidal?
Another line: ‘If you get to the end of a long life without one being crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention.’
The Narrator goes to uni, falls in love, keeps making his list. His mother kills herself. He keeps on making his list, gets married, falls apart. Then, eventually, he gets help, picks up the pieces, examines the pieces, perseveres and carries on. It’s not simple; it’s life. And life, as the Narrator points out, gets better – if you don’t give up on it.
This play has been performed countless times over four continents. Duncan McMillan co-wrote it with Johnny Donahoe, the first person to perform it in 2013 at Ludlow Fringe Festival. It’s a play about depression and mental health, and it’s told with the lights on and it is neither dispiriting nor maudlin but, instead, strangely uplifting in its message of hope and perseverance. Even more strangely, it is often very funny.
Whether as a seven-year-old talking to a psychologist’s sock puppet, or a teenager in love, or an adult in anguish, Rodgers carries the play. Involving audience members to be the dad, his school counsellor, his love interest, a vet, a uni professor and others means different personalities every night, different improvs and different shifts of mood – but Rodgers (who co directs) steers the play, seemingly effortlessly.
Steve Francis’s sound design is integral to the many moods of the work. It runs for approximately an hour and ten minutes (depending on those improvs) and it is wonderfully life affirming, reminding us all how easy it can be to take delight in the everyday. And in each other.
Until 26 January. Tickets: $33 (student saver) to $68.
