Disarming Moments of Honest Discomfort in ‘Every Brilliant Thing’

1: Ice creams. 2: Water Fights. 3: Stay up late and watch TV. In the theater monologue Every Brilliant Thing the seven-year-old protagonist compiles a list of things worth living for. The child has a depressed mother and begins the list after her first suicide attempt. It is the result of disarming childish logic: to keep her from trying again by flooding her with everyday moments of happiness. A small, big act.

The list of ‘brilliant things’ grows and grows, and as the character grows older, it continues to play a role: in the end, it is no longer the outstretched hand to the mother, but a life jacket in which the person herself, sometimes barely, remains afloat.

Every Brilliant Thing premiered twice last week at Het Nationale Theater: on Thursday performed by Bram Suijker, on Saturday by Tamar van den Dop. During the tour, the actors will take turns performing the monologue.

What is special about Duncan Macmillan’s play is the high degree to which the audience is involved in the performance. While the creation of the list is reconstructed during the performance and we see the main character grow older, the spectators are also constantly called in for help: for example, they give counterplay as a father, confidant, literature teacher or first love. The mother is not played by anyone, her absence hangs like a big cloud between actor and spectators.

Room for input

It is a cloud from which it does not always rain, and which even breaks open every now and then. The great strength of the text is precisely how the (child) character links incomprehension, anger and sadness to a loving look. Yes, the mother was plagued by her depression and it is certainly not trivialized, but she is also a loving woman, of whom beautiful memories are cherished.

Macmillan wrote a beautiful text in which he left a lot of room for the actor’s input and interpretation. Bram Suijker (33) plays the character impetuously, with a high energy and a youthful charm. With him you see the seven-year-old child who is overcome by events that he finds difficult to place. When he laughs, he laughs loudly, almost nervously.

Tamar van den Dop (52) is controlled and focused on the playing floor, she keeps calm. In her you immediately see the mature woman, full of strength but also unmistakably already marked by life. When she laughs, she does so in silence: a generous smile, behind which gleams resignation and wisdom acquired too soon.

Both characters touch you deeply, but in a different way.

As an actor, every performance of Every Brilliant Thing a risky venture: the public interaction has a high degree of unpredictability. Across the board, an audience usually does not react as you would expect – no matter how clear and concrete the assignment often is.

Spectators understandably react nervously, clumsily and erratically, unintentionally going off the rails and promptly making you laugh at things that are intensely painful (putting a dog to sleep, well-intentioned platitudes from a confidant). That produces disarming moments of honest discomfort at best. Every Brilliant Thing also explicitly becomes a collective act that is about the responsibility that you as a spectator (or bystander) can take for someone.

Understated game

Van den Dop did not always have it easy at the premiere: the interacting spectators were regularly very persistent in (unintentionally) disrupting the scene, which sometimes made it visibly difficult for her to pick up the thread again. At the same time, it is precisely this difficult muddling through, that feeling that the protagonist is struggling through the drama with the spectator, that is also very telling: in real life, conversations do not always run smoothly or as you hope – certainly not when the subjects are precarious.

Suijker loosens the reins in his interaction with the public. He seduces the spectators with winks and alert play, runs along the chairs with a high-five, creates a light atmosphere in which the preconditions of a great tragedy nestle almost imperceptibly, and then he overwhelms the spectator with deep, raw pain. That is precisely what he is looking for in small, subdued play. In contrast to his energetic performance before, he retroactively puts the entire performance in a different light.

Ultimately, the character’s greatest fear is recognizing the feeling that you don’t want to live anymore. That realization is terrifying, but – although that is almost incomprehensible with a suicidal mother – potentially also surmountable: everyone recognizes something of that gloom, which you sometimes cannot oversee or put into perspective. “If you’ve lived a lifetime without being deeply unhappy once, you probably haven’t been paying attention.”

Erik Whien’s sober, accurate direction is Every Brilliant Thing an intimate and comforting gem that is essentially about how you can be meaningful to someone else. A small, grand theater performance.

Also read the interview with Bram Suijker: ‘I am not an enlightened Buddhist. I want too much to participate in this charade’

Read also: This brilliant thing is what makes my life beautiful

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