Every Brilliant Thing review: Nothing trivial about this list

Every Brilliant Thing ★★★★
Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire

Midway through Duncan Macmillan's artfully engaging play, written with its amiable performer Jonny Donahoe, a young man burns with embarrassment when his life's work is accidentally discovered. This is a list, started at the age of seven, of everything that makes life worth living.

It begins with ice cream, ranks Danger Mouse above spaghetti Bolognese, and finds room for guilty delights (“people falling over”) or intimate confidences (someone “to check your teeth for broccoli”). Now exposed, though, it seems simple and naive: a trivial way to save a life.

This charming, intelligent production from Paines Plough and Pentabus is still more sensitive than its character to the perils of fighting clinical depression with pure whimsy. A litany of brilliant things is an understandably childlike response to the “first attempt” the narrator’s mother makes at suicide; an act that, like most adults, he can barely understand. Through various life stages, from school to college, marriage to mortgage, this list grows to fairytale proportions, in towers of paper and blizzards of Post-it notes. And though Donahoe is never certain if it moves his mother, he has innumerable allies in his audience.

In director George Perrin’s fleet, unadorned production, staged in the round, audience involvement is enlisted with a gentle touch. But more than generating entertaining frisson, it actually becomes part of its meaning. When irresponsibly reported, the narrator learns, suicide can be contagious. But in the right circumstances, so is joy. In Donahoe’s endearingly bright performance, we have someone looking for connections – in his mother’s responses, at the door of his father’s study, in kindly schoolteachers or severe lecturers, and in exchanges with a loving accomplice. We provide another kind of connection, a stand-in for people cheeringly ready to listen and assist, and as the narrator’s adulthood darkens with complexity, that support becomes more important than any compilation.

It's not for nothing that this story is threaded through with humour and music, nor that Donahoe's character finds such pleasure in his father's vinyl collection. In the end, you realise, his list is not an incentive for life, but a record of living. You find yourself keen to add to it. Until October 16th