4 hours ago
6
Minnie Driver has joined the list of stars performing Every Brilliant Thing – a play told by one actor with the help of almost the entire audience – in London’s West End. The show opens next month at @sohoplace with Lenny Henry in the principal role; later it will be played by Sue Perkins, Ambika Mod and Jonny Donahoe, the comedian who presided over its triumphant run at the Edinburgh fringe in 2014 and far beyond.
For Driver it marks a return to the venue where she performed White Rabbit Red Rabbit for one night last November. That theatrical experiment required a different actor to perform the play, sight unseen, each time. Driver, who shot to fame in the 1990s films Circle of Friends and Good Will Hunting, is no stranger to the London stage. In 2003 she starred in the West End alongside Matthew Perry in David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago.
Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan with Donahoe, is based around a list created by the narrator to remind his mum, after her first suicide attempt, of everything that’s worth living for. “I have wanted to do a play in London again for the longest time,” said Driver. “I didn’t want to take on a big classical role, walk down a well-trodden path. I wanted to find something that would be new to a lot of audiences, that was both funny and sad and unique in its storytelling – something unusual that you’d talk about on the train home, think about the next day at work. I knew how I wanted it to make me feel, I just didn’t know what it was. Then I read Duncan’s play.”
Driver said that “the thought of doing a one-person show is like staring up at an enormous mountain that you’re expected to free solo”, but added that the play’s “clarity, humanity and humour struck me really deeply. I am terrified and excited in equal measure to tell this brilliant, beautiful story and to be in such a great company.”
The play’s run has now been extended to 8 November. It will be directed by Jeremy Herrin and Macmillan, marking the show’s West End debut after being performed in more than 80 countries and adapted into a film.
