Every Brilliant Thing, @sohoplace review - return of the comedy about suicide that lifts the spirits

The Fringe piece Duncan Macmillan devised with Jonny Donahoe in 2014 has since been round the world and back, finally landing in the West End. It feels as freshly minted as ever.

The premise is simple: a performer takes an audience through the story of his mother’s three suicide attempts, the last one fatal, calling on them to participate when he gives his cues. An assistant director has cased the joint before curtain up, choosing people and giving them numbered cards; some will play a significant part in the story. 

For the play’s current run, five different performers are leading the proceedings, each one customising the text to suit their personal profile (eg gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality). Some of the music played in the piece can be adapted to their requirements as well. First up is Lenny Henry, who is also a member of the welcome party that’s choosing likely participants as they enter. He’s probably already in motion, dancing along to the piped in music. 

The tale he has to tell starts when his (unnamed) character is a boy of seven at school, and news arrives that his mother is in hospital after her first suicide attempt. Suddenly the concept of death has arrived on his horizon. We follow his story through university, another suicide attempt, marriage, his mother’s funeral. His father is a private man, given to sitting alone listening to his favourite music. (If it’s freeform jazz, his son knows not to interrupt him.) They have a difficult relationship that gradually mellows.

What sustains our hero is the list he starts making, of brilliant things: everything that makes him happy and is worth staying alive for – favourite foods, feelings, events. He adds to it all the time, reaching one million items by the time he stops, years later. When he shouts out a number, the person with that card responds with what’s written there. No 1, unsurprisingly given the compiler’s age at the start of his project, is “ice cream”. His millionth entry is one many people over 50 probably have in their top 10.

It’s an exercise that makes him happy, but also one he is creating for his mother. He regularly gives her the Post-its he has used for the list but finds them stacked in little yellow piles in her room, possibly unread, as is the list he posts to her. Nothing daunted, he goes on, recruiting the girl he fancies at uni to supply her favourite things, adding to the list whenever an item suggests itself. By the end, he has a small trolley of storage boxes to show for his efforts.

Henry is a natural for this assignment, still a livewire performer (watch him fly as he listens to his favourite bongos solo), but warm and accessible, a born communicator and improviser who can coax even the shyest person to deliver. When the participants fluff or dry, he is there to tease them gently and steer them back to their role. When he himself fluffed, reading out “hotpot” instead of “hotspot”, the place erupted. He also got good comic mileage from the scene where he has to borrow two books randomly from the audience to re-enact meeting his future girlfriend at uni, and was clearly delighted to end up with Ben McIntyre’s account of the 1980 terrorist attack on Iran’s London embassy, The Siege, and a novel titled Bunny.

Some, as is often the case these days, can’t wait to join in. The woman playing his beloved school librarian the night I was there was a joy, producing dad-jokes on demand and cheerily talking to him in the persona of Bernie, her sock-come-puppet. Henry had fun, too, with the woman persuaded to play the vet who came to the house to euthanise his dog, Ronnie Barker. (The dog was played by a purloined coat, the injection delivered by ballpoint pen, though only when the “vet” had been directed to the correct end of the “dog” to administer it.)

Those in the audience without cards or roles to play get to sing and clap instead. The narrator’s family, he tells us, were especial fans of a Ray Charles number in which he sings the word “you” with a sustained high-pitched “oo”, which we got to perform several times; many of us were also high-fived by Henry as he ran around all the ends of rows in the space, ending in an exhausted heap. 

All very well, some may be saying, but what has all this clowning around to do with suicide? It’s an integral part, for the writers, of learning to cope and go on with life, despite loss and grief; to choose high-fives over hand-wringing, each day notching up a small happiness, another reason to want to be alive. Henry reads out the Samaritans’ official guidelines on the subject, which forbid easy answers. He then underlines the message: don’t ask why it happened because you will never really know. Just be sure to tend to your own mental health.

In its decision to balance grief and glee and not to allow one to exclude the other, this is a clear-sighted, heartening show. It’s no surprise that it has been performed to huge acclaim in more than 70 countries around the world in the past decade.

• Every Brilliant Thing at @sohoplace until 8 November
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk