314. The way Ray Charles sings the word “you”.
These words were written on the note which Leah Aspden handed me as I took my seat in the Pilch. I was instructed – as were the many others also with notes – to read the line when my number was called. At that point, and again when the play began and the house lights did not go down, something icy gripped my heart: this was to be a night of audience participation.
Peach Productions’ staging of Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, directed by Lydia Free and Coco Cottam, made unapologetic demands of its viewers – perhaps more accurately termed its participants.
This theatrical bildungsroman followed a single character, an unnamed narrator (Aspden), from the age of seven – coping with the death of her dog (Sherlock Bones, played with aplomb by a coat), and her mother’s first suicide attempt. Over the course of roughly an hour, the narrator whizzed through her school years, headed off to university, fell in love, married, divorced, and buried her mother. All the while she continued adding to her list of “every brilliant thing” – also begun at seven with:
- Ice cream.
- Water fights.
- Staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV.
Aspden was frequently joined onstage by audience members, conscripted to ‘play’ essential figures in her life: a vet, her father, Mrs Patterson (the school counsellor), and others. In each instance, the [un]lucky individual was chosen because, felicitously – “you look just like [insert person here]…it’s really weird” – honestly, it’s funny every time.
Indeed, the comedy in every single one of these interactions was exquisite, even more so for being unrepeatable, unique, and entirely unpredictable – in most instances there was genuine audience improvisation. Some examples:
One person – the narrator’s father – was both the originator of what became a running joke about challenging-to-digest lasagna, and the enthusiastic (despite being mystifyingly unfamiliar with his oeuvre) belter of Sinatra’s That’s Life.
Another – Sam, the narrator’s university sweetheart and eventual partner – imbued their mostly non-verbal character with an almost efflorescent horniness, coquettishly batting their eyelashes at the slightest provocation. The two bonded in the library over cultural histories of China and Italy (i.e. the books which a roomful of Oxford humanities students happened to have at hand).
A third – Mrs Patterson, the (in this performance) world weary counsellor – was compelled at multiple points to remove an (apparently very laced-up) boot and sock in order to signify the puppet to which the narrator poured out her heart. This puppet was named Peter, in honour – it seemed – of the first gentleman of Magdalen College, Peter Kessler. I still smile at the memory of c. 60 seconds of unlacing followed by a weary sigh of “Okay, Peter’s here”.
At the centre of all this was the narrator; was Leah Aspden. And she was luminous. Entirely charismatic, she held the entire room in her hand and didn’t let go for a single moment. The improvised comedy worked as well as it did because of Aspden’s asides and because of her radar for funny situations – refusing, for example, to let up on the “lecturer”, a poor audience member asked to speak off the cuff on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (“have you even read it???”).
As alluded to earlier in this review, we learn from the narrator that her mother does eventually take her own life after a long battle with depression, an illness with which the narrator herself also struggles, more and more. It is heartbreaking because Aspden is an actor of great depth and sensitivity, and because the play contrasts the childishly optimistic list against the dark depths into which it is possible for someone to fall.
The reminder, then, is that life is infinitely more complex and more challenging and more painful than it appears to a seven year-old. And yet, resolutely looking for joy, for brilliance, is still a noble and a valuable endeavour – because it is there to be found. And, as the play reminded us, even if things don’t always get great, they do get better.
The moment which encapsulated this run of Every Brilliant Thing, for me at least, came when Aspden announced, unexpectedly, “I’m going to high five the entire room!” She then ran madly around trying to get to as much of the audience as possible. After all, and forgive my mawkishness, this is a play about connection.
I didn’t know most of the people in the audience, most I will never speak to and I wouldn’t recognise if I passed in the street. The play’s run is over. But in spite of this reality, I felt – I feel – somehow connected to everyone who was in the Pilch that night. Theatre, in its sheer immediacy, is the most human of all the artforms.