It was ten years ago when Jonny Donahoe debuted this play in Paines Plough’s Roundabout mobile theatre on the Fringe; it has since been on tour, been performed in New York and even toured Greece and Cyprus in a Greek language version.
If I were to put together a list of every brilliant thing I had seen in Edinburgh, this would be pretty near the top, and it hasn’t lost any of its impact in a decade.
As the audience enters, Donahoe hands out pieces of paper that they will be asked to read out at some point in the show when he says their number. Others will be called upon to play parts in his story, but this isn’t a show to avoid if you don’t like audience participation as it is all very non-threatening and well-judged.
Our storyteller takes us back to when he was seven years old and his earliest introduction to death, when the vet put down his beloved dog, Ronnie Barker. Soon after that, his father was driving him to the hospital to visit his mother, whom he said had “done something stupid”—that would not be the last of her suicide attempts.
This is when he saw a very sympathetic school counsellor and started his numbered list of “brilliant things”, constantly adding to it over the subsequent years and later leaving it for his mother to read in the hope that she wouldn’t be so sad.
Skipping forward, he meets a girl in the library at university and they start going out together. He is mortified when she finds his list, but instead of being put off him, she adds her own entries. They are married and set up home together, but he says he fears happiness as it is always followed by a “crushing low”, and they end up separating.
This is a great story brilliantly told, and Donohoe is the perfect teller of it. Many of the brilliant things in the list raise a smile or a laugh or just a nod of the head. The play and performance are often very funny and just as often very moving, sometimes at the same time. Like his current Jonny and the Baptists show, The Happiness Index, it raises important issues about mental health and its treatment, but within the context of a story about a character we can’t help but fall in love with.
After ten years, this is still high on my list of all-time brilliant things, and I highly recommend you add it to your list of things to see in Edinburgh if you haven’t already and can still get a ticket.