Theatre has been used as a medium to communicate society’s toughest issues for hundreds of years. Every Brilliant Thing is a show by Silo Theatre company encouraging thoughtful discussion of depression and suicide in a year where people’s mental health has been put under heavy pressure.

What got us through lockdown? It was music. Can you imagine lockdown without music? Can you imagine lockdown without movies, without art, without all those things?

As we shuffle into the opening performance of Every Brilliant Thing at Auckland’s Samoa House, we’re handed numbered cards with brief phrases on them and given simple instructions – when your number is called, read your card.

Yells of “ice cream”, “bubble wrap” and “Jonah Lomu” from the audience punctuate the often heavy monologues about a child dealing with trauma in a way only a child can. As the main character grows and spirals into his own form of the depression that plagued his mother, the audience plays their part in helping him through it, reading to him from his own list of “every brilliant thing” in the world...

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