The first half of September once again treated me to two unforgettable theatre experiences in Coventry. In the Criterion Theatre, I watched a performance of Duncan Macmillan’s play, Every Brilliant Thing, played by long-term company member Jon Elves. Then a week later, in the B2 studio of the Belgrade Theatre, I sat at Casey Bailey’s Please Do Not Touch, played by Tijan Sarr, whom the audience may know from various TV series.
As this description suggests, both plays are one-man shows, and this is not the only similarity. In both cases, the theatre space has been designed to resemble the structure of ancient Greek theatre, with the audience surrounding the actor from multiple sides, sitting in square-shaped amphitheatres. For Please Do Not Touch, this meant three rows, forming three sides of the square, and for Every Brilliant Thing, it meant a full square. As argued below, both settings were designed very carefully and served the purpose of the respective plays very well, adding a lot of extra value to them.
The first surprise the audience faced while walking in for Every Brilliant Thing was Jon Elves already running around the four rows, handing out cards to members of the audience. Mine said: #1857 – Planning a declaration of love. But we only understood what this meant once he started the monologue and sketched the context: the protagonist’s mother attempted suicide when they were a child, and as a response (or coping mechanism), they started to write down all the things that made life worthwhile. Number One – ice cream. Number Two – water fights. Number Three – staying up past your bedtime…
As my use of the they/them pronoun reveals, one particularity of Every Brilliant Thing is that the unnamed protagonist’s gender is not specified; neither of their love interest who consciously received a unisex name from the playwright. In this case, because Jon Elves played them, the protagonist was characterised as a man, and the love interest (to whom we will come back later) became a woman.
Please Do Not Touch, on the other hand, could have only been played by a man – a young man like Tijan Sarr, of Black African origin, speaking with a strong accent (well done on that!), exploding from energy and ideas. His name, Mason, is perfectly chosen, and his own frame story (dark pun intended) is no less tragic and uncomfortable than the one in Every Brilliant Thing: in a museum in Britain, he intends to steal an African artefact but is caught and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The rest of the show is a painfully minuscule representation of serving his sentence; although it was a one-act play, I totally felt the eighteen months slowly trudging by, the impatience and frustration cramping not only Mason’s muscles but also ours in the audience.
The studio environment in the Belgrade Theatre did a great job in recreating the inhumane atmosphere of a prison. There was only a bunk bed, a futuristic-looking foldable bookcase (representing the prison library), a table with a chair, and four huge neon tube-like columns in each corner of the square. It did not only represent the physical environment of the prison, but felt like the inside of the prisoner’s mind. As Tijan Sarr was running and jumping around, making a good use of every single part of the scenery, sometimes even pushing his own prison cell around, we did not only feel the physical torture of being locked up, but also the mental and psychic torture of being trapped inside one’s mind. No escape in any case. Mason has a lot of time to reflect on his own situation, but also on the institutional racism and the amount of outrageous injustice he is forced to face. This works so well because he is indeed alone, the most alone possible: when there is dialogue in the script, he does both parts, literally talking to himself. And these conversations are often loaded with tension, conflicts, sometimes even hatred…
Every Brilliant Thing, however, followed a radically different path. Jon Elves involved the audience from all around the four rows, always coming up with something unexpected. Shouting our ‘brilliant thing’ from the card when he counted its number was the least: he randomly picked audience members to assist him with certain dialogues and actions. They became “the literature professor”, “the dad” or “Sam the love interest”, whatever Jon Elves instructed them to. It required an extremely quick reaction time and a high level of creative engagement from the actor’s side, but the chosen audience members were equally challenged with their own improvisation tasks. This, of course, results in a different show every time. (Note to posterity: the sock dog was named Harvey, and the dad’s wedding speech was better than a real one!)
Even though the audience often laughed at the absurdity of certain situations, the core of Every Brilliant Thing was literally deadly serious. It handled the themes of suicide, depression, PTSD, and the inheritance of mental illnesses with an extreme care, full of empathy and down-to-earth knowledge, even thematising how suicide should (not) be thematised in public discourse – theatre plays included. Paradoxically, the best possible way to deliver all this cognitive and emotional information about such a heavy subject was to handle it with charm and humour, and the best tool for that was to make the audience part of the acting.
Please Do Not Touch and Every Brilliant Thing are theatre experiences at their finest. It was liberating to see how Mason knocks down the neon tube-like pillars of a society as unfair and rotten to the core, and I am so delighted to see how many sensitive and uncomfortable questions this play managed to TOUCH. And the coming-of-age story of a boy in the gloomy shadow of her mother’s mental illness, finding his way to carry on with life despite all his transgenerational and individual baggage, was truly a BRILLIANT THING to see.
Every Brilliant Thing
Criterion Theatre, 6 September 2024
Writer: Duncan Macmillan. Director: Anne-marie Greene. Cast: John Elves, audience.
Please Do Not Touch
Belgrade Theatre, 13 September 2024
Writer: Casey Bailey. Director: Gail Babb. Cast: Tijan Sarr (Mason), Jade Samuels (voiceover – radio presenter), Corey Campbell (voiceover – Marsh/Anson), Paul Warwick (voiceover – judge).
Author’s note: this review was written on my own accord, and I wasn’t present at the two performances as a representative of the press, but as a member of the audience.
Sources for the cover picture are production photos from the Criterion Theatre website, as well as the poster from the Belgrade Theatre website.
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