Theatre Review: Little Big Things brings large joy

Little Big Things, Soho Place, London, until November 25

It’s in the nature of social networking sites that we tend to come to absurdly swift views about the lives of the people we find on them. So it was during the lockdown a few years ago when I noticed that someone called Henry Fraser was following me on Twitter. In the space of a few seconds, I classified him in my head as a good-looking young guy, wheelchair-bound and paralysed from the chest down after an accident, who was painting rather great pictures with his mouth.

I followed him back but didn’t give him another thought until a direct message came through. “Can I be super cheeky please and ask if you could retweet this for me?” he asked, attaching an image he had posted of one of his paintings. “If not, please feel free to tell me to b—– off!” Of course I was happy to accede to his request and this caused me to append another word to my brief summary of Henry Fraser – and that word was spirited.

That spiritedness became manifest in a moving book that he wrote about his life and now it’s celebrated, too, in a musical called The Little Big Things that’s directed by Nick Butcher, who also furnished the music. Fraser is played pre-accident by Jonny Amies and post-accident by Ed Larkin and the acting is of a uniformly high order. Amy Trigg acquits herself as ever very well as Fraser’s physio and mentor. Tom Ling’s lyrics are good, Joe White’s script is no-nonsense, and Colin Richmond’s set, while not especially elaborate, also does what it needs to.

It was a clever little conceit having the pre-accident and post-accident Fraser on stage: the former, to start with, tormenting the latter, full of regret and bitterness, but gradually, as the show progresses, the two come to an accommodation with each other.

Still, it’s hard, considering the basic components of the show, to work out why it is quite so extraordinarily powerful. The sum of its parts was, however, there to behold at the end of the opening night as I looked around the theatre and realised there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, mine included.

These were emphatically not tears of pity for Fraser, but the tears that just occasionally flow when we see the best of humanity, coming through the worst of times with grace, humility and, yes, spirit. At a time when we have seen so much of the worst of it, this show appears to be tapping into something big.