Every Brilliant Thing

There’s a built-in ingenuity to Duncan Macmillan’s 2013 play Every Brilliant Thing. It demands a tight control of the audience from the sole performer, yet it also manages to be perfectly transportable.

It is a play that manages to convey a delicate sense of the pain and fearsome impenetrability experienced by someone whose life has been affected by a loved one’s depression or suicide. It’s easy to see why An Tobar and Mull Theatre’s new artistic director Rebecca Atkinson-Lord has chosen it as her first piece in her new home, and to bring back live work to the Scottish island theatre.

The show is ripe for a community theatre staging. Mull Theatre’s version kicks off in its venue, before what is essentially two back-to-back mini tours. One is of church halls on Mull (population 3,000) and the adjoining Iona, and the other around a few mainland Scottish venues that are nowhere near the big cities.

The piece hangs on its sole performer, and in Naomi Stirrat, Atkinson-Lord has found a strikingly capable actor to carry the play. The plot line is very simple – it follows a young woman from idyllic childhood to imperfect adulthood, and the ways her mother’s illness has impacted her along the way.

Yet the staging demands an intensity of concentration and commitment. Stirrat, as the unnamed woman (Macmillan’s text allows for the role to be played by any actor, and for local references to be edited in), must not only memorise the text, but the number of each brilliant thing she gave every audience member on a sticky note as she welcomed them in.

All the while, she has to improvise, responding to the unscripted words of the audience members who become involved. Played on a basic, in-the-round stage for 30 viewers, house lights up and a small shrine of personal effects in the middle, she finds a vet for her doomed dog, a father and a lover. On press night, the audience member who invented her guidance teacher’s sock puppet "Woofus" was a real star.

Yet no one can steal Stirrat’s thunder and the sheer physicality of her performance is mesmerising. For anyone who is lucky enough to experience it, this version will surely spark strong feelings of comfort, reflection and warm humour.

Much like the lead character’s list, we don’t want it to finish. Hopefully dates in the big cities or at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe might be possible in future.