Every Brilliant Thing review: Lenny Henry brings laughs and lows

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The play follows Henry’s character from the age of seven, as he begins a list of "every brilliant thing" to help himself and his mother, who struggles with severe depression. The list starts playfully – with “ice cream” at age seven – and eventually numbers a million as the years go by.

What initially works in this production’s favour is the sense of accessibility Henry brings as a performer. His warmth and comic instincts highlight the play’s core message: that happiness is often only surface-deep, and those who appear the lightest may be concealing profound pain. It’s a necessary reminder, especially given the subject matter.

However, Every Brilliant Thing stands or falls on the nature of its audience participation. At several points, randomly selected theatregoers read items from the list aloud, or are drawn into small cameo roles (teachers, loved ones, vets).

This gives each performance a unique quality: some audiences gel, while others are left scrambling for cues. Not everyone is given a card, so the experience can feel arbitrary – exhilarating for some, for others, disruptive.

While the play addresses the taboo of mental health and suicide, it does so in rather a superficial way. The core concept of listing life’s small joys raises the question: is this list a celebration or merely a coping mechanism? The answer, frustratingly, remains unclear.

Lenny Henry's Every Beautiful Thing. Helen Murray

Moments that could carry emotional weight are sometimes rushed; for example, the list suddenly leaps into six digits, skipping years of character development. The passage from childhood to adulthood – from losing a pet to losing a parent – feels abrupt and a tad unconvincing.

Tonally, the show swings between earnest vulnerability and laugh-out-loud moments, but not always successfully. At times, the easy laughter – often prompted by Henry cracking jokes or riffing with the audience – cuts across the piece’s emotional depth. Instead of reinforcing the character’s fragility, these moments risk trivialising it. The laughter sometimes comes at the expense of the story’s momentum and intimacy and his character is lost. For an 85-minute production, there’s a lot of applause and waiting for audience participation, which can dilute the emotional arc.

This version feels more like “Lenny Henry presents” than an immersion into the character’s fraught interior life between the lack of direction and himself.

Supporting roles from the audience, like Mrs Patterson the teacher with her sock-puppet Graham, offer sweetness, but the story never quite knits together. The lighting is basic and the production unadorned, which suits the text’s openness, but also contributes to a sense of a show that never entirely settle, much like our minds sometimes, I suppose.

Every Brilliant Thing will affect each person differently, depending on their own relationship with the themes depicted. That’s part of its charm, but also its risk. Some will walk away touched, others perplexed. Much is glossed over, and the impact of suicide and the realities of mental illness remain largely undiscussed. The play hints at the difficulties beneath life’s cheerful details, but can feel disjointed and even shallow, never reaching the emotional resolve it promises.

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