Naomi Denny’s moving debut explores the lingering echoes of sibling loss with humour, heart, and haunting clarity.
★★★★
“When your sister dies, it’s like you aren’t a sister anymore—only you are.” Grief rears its head as the central force in this moving and imaginative piece from writer-performer Naomi Denny, a Soho Theatre Labs alumni. In All The Happy Things, Sienna (Denny) is trying her best to adjust to the death of her sister at the age of 25. Her attempts to do this meet all the usual demands grief puts upon us, with a slight caveat—she’s literally seeing her dead sister everywhere and the two regularly converse.
Most plays at their core can be whittled down to themes of love and death, so it’s hard to do something completely original with the subject matter. Denny and director Lucy Jane Atkinson, however, pull it off professionally, detailing effectively how Sienna’s life unravels in the throes of grief. Her work is impacted and she’s forced to take a mental health sabbatical, her love life with doting boyfriend Sam (Dejon Mullings) equally so, and her dad’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, already a complicated situation, becomes her sole burden to bear.
What works so well here, and sets it apart, is the play’s nuanced exploration of precisely what we face when a sibling dies—not just a distorted sense of the past but of our own identity. Sienna struggles with this most astutely; how the world around her now defines her as the-girl-with-the-dead-sister, and it’s the overbearing grief for her sense of self as well as the demise of her sister that now infiltrates her existence inescapably. It aslos transforms her handling of her father’s ailing condition: as he increasingly forgets who he is as his deterioration progresses, losing his identity too in the process, she’s left alone to deal with it. With Emily gone, there’s no one to share this complicated burden with. The play highlights how Alzheimer’s can feel like an early death for the ill person’s loved ones, made all the worse when the parent starts confusing siblings for each other.
The use of music is key to the drama, and there’s a particularly funny ‘No Scrubs’ reference that resurfaces a few times, and an interesting use of dance and movement to create the scene transitions, with some powerful sound design that regularly brings us back to the car accident that took Emily’s life. The play’s main strength is very much in how, despite its dark subject matter and status as an Odyssey of grief, it isn’t a downer. There’s humour throughout. It’s meaningful humour too, as with a point towards the end where Sienna tells her sister how she can’t look at a pack of Mini Cheddars because they were her favourite crisp. It’s a moving moment and shows how even the most banal everyday items can be triggers in the aftermath of a death, but the script doesn’t leave us there long. As Emily says those aren’t her favourite crisps, she’s a Chilli Sensations fan—Mini Cheddars are their dad’s crisp of choice. Denny manages to introduce a delicate balance of funny and poignant that, in scenes like this one, are particularly well navigated.
The runtime is perfect, not too short or too long, at 75 minutes. It gets a little too Blithe Spirit in a later sequence when Sienna confesses to Clive that she’s actually seeing Emily’s presence, and it feels this might have been more effective if the conversations with Emily remained symbolic rather than literal. It commendably ends on the right note, however, and there’s something truly powerful in the script and performances that leave it lingering with you.
All The Happy Things is a tender, smartly constructed play that avoids sentimentality while still packing an emotional punch. Denny’s performance is raw and compelling, and her writing is honest, funny, and deeply felt. It’s a moving portrait of grief in all its messiness – and how, even in the midst of loss, joy and humour can still survive.
All The Happy Things will be performed at Soho Theatre until 26 April.
Words by James Morton
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