The funniest play about depression you will ever see, and one of the most honest things theatre has done with mental health in a generation.

Why it matters right now

We are living through a period of widespread, openly discussed mental illness and yet most of our public conversations about it are terrible. They are either clinical and distant, or so saturated with careful language that the actual feeling gets lost. Every Brilliant Thing walks straight into that gap. It talks about depression and suicide with warmth, with laughter, with the lights on. It asks the audience to participate, to say things out loud, to be present together in a room with a subject most people spend their lives avoiding. In 2026, when loneliness is an epidemic and helplines are overwhelmed, a play that turns a theatre into a community for 70 minutes feels genuinely radical.

The story in three sentences

A seven-year-old, trying to help a mother who has just attempted suicide, starts a handwritten list of everything worth living for — ice cream, staying up past bedtime, the smell of old books. The list grows alongside the narrator as they move through childhood, adolescence, university, a marriage, a divorce, and a second crisis. By the end, the list has thousands of items and the narrator has learned something about what it means to stay.

The moment you will remember

Before the play begins, as the audience takes their seats, ushers hand out slips of paper to people in the crowd. Each slip has a number and a phrase — “number 37: a dog waving its tail so hard its whole back end moves,” “number 142: the smell of a wooden pencil when you sharpen it.” When those numbers are called during the show, whoever holds the slip reads it out. Strangers in the dark, shouting out small joys. It is a theatrical device that sounds gimmicky on paper and is quietly devastating in practice. You realise, around item number 200, that the audience has been building the list together and that the play has made you all, briefly, the child trying to find reasons.

Who it is for

Read or see this if: you have ever been close to someone with depression and felt helpless. If you are sceptical about theatre and think it cannot surprise you. If you want proof that a solo show with no set, no costume and no props can devastate a room. If you are training in mental health, education or social work (several productions have been staged in hospitals, universities and community centres specifically for this reason).

Be aware if: the subject of parental depression or suicide is something you are currently living through rather than looking back on. The play handles it with enormous care but it does not look away.

The debate

The play ends on a note of hard-won, qualified hope. The list does not fix anything. The mother’s illness does not resolve cleanly. The narrator survives, loves, loses, carries on. Which raises a question the play circles without quite answering: is making a list of reasons to live a healthy act of resistance, or a way of avoiding the actual work of getting help? Is there a version of cheerful coping that keeps us from seeking treatment? The play is too honest to come down firmly on either side, and that is what makes it worth arguing about.