The Good-Heartedness of Daniel Radcliffe in Every Brilliant Thing
David Buchanan
Daniel Radcliffe certainly knows well the rigors of performing at rapid speed on the stage of the Hudson Theatre. The veteran of five prior Broadway shows earned his first Tony Award nomination and win for the 2023 revival of musical Merrily We Roll Along, acknowledged in large part for the coiled intensity with which he tackled the famous Stephen Sondheim tongue-tangler “Franklin Shepherd, Inc.” Now two-and-a-half years later, in the understatedly lovely play Every Brilliant Thing, Radcliffe’s breathlessness begins before the show proper.
The pre-show ritual of the solo play, written by Duncan Macmillan with Jonny Donahoe and first staged back in 2013, involves Radcliffe, Associate Director David Hull, and other members of the production team selecting the convocation of voices and bodies who will fill out the unnamed Narrator’s monologue, in which he grapples with his mother’s suicide attempts and writes a compendium of everyday “brilliant things” to inspire his mother and himself to live. The jazz-propelled pace with which Radcliffe flits around the large auditorium to introduce himself and select his castmates has an immediately endearing and humanizing effect.
The instant rapport quickly pays dividends mere moments into the show’s seventy-minute runtime, when the Narrator invites the audience to help him recollect his first encounter with the concept of death. With a jacket or cardigan from one audience member, a pen or pencil from another, the participation of a third to stand in for a veterinarian, and a wristwatch from a fourth, he recreates the last thirty seconds of his dog Indiana Bones’ life. Simply conjured, the scene felt incredibly powerful at the Wednesday matinee press performance because of the tenderness with which the young woman portraying the vet treated the moment.
Indeed, it is Radcliffe’s overabundant empathy and good-heartedness that elicits such profoundly moving interactions with audience members. He shepherds the whole event with such grace that each participant approaches their scenes with reverence and care, which makes Every Brilliant Thing a rewarding experience.
The theatrical alchemy of Every Brilliant Thing rests on the extraordinarily variable nature of audience participation. But Radcliffe proves so adroit at working with however much or little he’s given, not to mention the impossible-to-predict gaffes and missed cues along the way, that he will no doubt always make these scenes resonate during the production’s thirteen-week run.
The spontaneity of Every Brilliant Thing sometimes produces unexpected resonances. Take the man with light-washed jeans and tortoise glasses whom Radcliffe asked to play the Narrator’s notoriously taciturn father at the matinee on March 11, who later volunteered a book for a scene set in a university library and pulled out the illicitly titled novel Old Filth by Jane Gardam. The contrast between who we knew the father to be as a character and the man’s reading material drew gobs of laughs. But unbeknownst to attendees during the show, that text ironically tackles the death of the protagonist’s wife, heaping another layer of meaning atop the Narrator’s meet-cute.
Such opportunities abound throughout the show, and Every Brilliant Thing wisely ends before it all becomes overindulgent or too saccharine.
Yet the brevity of the play also shortchanges the character who is ostensibly at the very heart of the piece—the Narrator’s mother. Yes, he stresses that the haunting “why” of suicide is irreparably unanswerable. But the play sometimes provides slightly too thin a sketch of her despite our emotional understanding of her relationship with the Narrator.
There is something dramaturgically potent about leaving this one character less accessible than the other outsized figures in the Narrator’s life, including his father; his first love, Sam; and his school counsellor, Mrs. Patterson; for surely how could anyone successfully capture the emotional complexity of her in so little time, and what would the ethics even be of having an audience member portray her?
Strikingly, these questions situate Every Brilliant Thing in dialogue with an earlier play from this Broadway season, Bess Wohl’s Liberation, in which main character Lizzie (Susannah Flood) herself steps into the role of her mother to explore her participation in the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s and to attempt to understand the irreconcilable compromises she made. When the experience of inhabiting her mother and interviewing her confidants falls short of answering her questions, a different character from the play, Margie (Betsy Aidem) momentarily takes up the mantle, affording Lizzie the chance to ask her a seemingly unanswerable question about her life, “Was it what you wanted it to be?,” and draws out this powerful confession: “There’s so much of me that I didn’t show you. I guess that’s always true with mothers.”
Should Every Brilliant Thing have somehow centered the Narrator’s mother’s own voice more, made her emotional interiority more accessible or knowable, even while emphasizing how much must remain beyond the Narrator’s and our own grasps? It is a thorny question, and theatregoers should consider the ambiguity of the play another “brilliant thing” with which we are lucky to grapple.