How a grieving museum guard found healing in art – then a bestselling memoir and a play

Independent

06-04-2025

At the age of 25, Patrick Bringley realised he no longer had the appetite for his glitzy job on the events team at The New Yorker. It was 2008, and he'd just lived through the death of his 26-year-old brother, Tom, from cancer. 'I had lost someone, I did not wish to move on from that,' Bringley writes in his memoir, All the Beauty in the World. 'In a sense, I didn't wish to move at all.' He found a job that fitted his state of mind, as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Ten long years passed, with Bringley standing watch as visitors moved through the vast museum, marvelling at its treasures. Now, Bringley is preparing to tread the boards at the off-Broadway DR2 Theatre for the opening night of his one-man show based on his bestselling memoir. 'I can rekindle these feelings when I'm on stage,' he tells me.
We're standing in the atrium outside the museum's American wing, bathed in light from the glass ceiling. Facing us is the grand, 19th-century facade of a Wall Street bank. 'They tore it down in the 1910s,' Bringley, now 41, tells me matter-of-factly. 'The Met said, 'We'll take it!'' Since the publication of his book in 2023, the writer, who has an undergraduate degree from New York University and a master's in history from nearby Hunter College, has led private tours at the Met, which he says are 'lucrative'. Now, Bringley is bringing his memoir to life on stage with the help of Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London. 'There seemed something so natural to me about doing a one-man show about a lonesome figure like a guard,' says Bringley. 'It just makes a certain cosmic sense.'
At first glance, Bringley looks gentle and unassuming. He's dressed for our meeting in jeans and a slouchy blazer. His wispy blond hair is somewhere between neat and unkempt – respectable. When he speaks, however, Bringley has the mesmerising air of a man who's found enlightenment. 'What was extraordinary about coming to this place, and my job, is that I was forced to step outside the normal flow of life. And when you do that, you realise that you can start thinking with an incredible freedom,' he tells me, 'because you're not just forced to funnel your thoughts down into some actionable little piece of intelligence that's going to forward your career, or impress the guy sitting next to you. Instead, I can think grandiose thoughts, or foolish thoughts, or experimental thoughts. You can stop and think, 'What the hell is this existence?' The sort of things a philosopher would think, or a Buddhist monk would think.
'And here, you have so many things to ping that off against,' he adds, casting a hand around at the Met's innumerable masterpieces. 'And I found it to be the only way to really perceive the true beauty, and mystery, and majesty, and strangeness of this existence.'
Days later, I'm speaking to Dromgoole about his earnest new apprentice. 'He's got a good, bright spirit,' he tells me. 'You just think, God, that's somebody who has worked out how to walk well through the world.' The pair met at the Charleston Literary Festival in 2023, bonding over their mutual love of Shakespeare before Bringley gave a presentation on his book. Dromgoole was instantly impressed. 'He's got a very seemingly guileless way of looking quite 'Aw, shucks', and quite innocent, and then taking you through to places you don't expect to go to, that are quite rich and quite profound.'
Across 80 minutes on stage, Bringley will portray himself, fellow guards, museum visitors, and even his late brother. 'I spent about three hours a day for 10 weeks just running lines,' he says of memorising the gargantuan script. He did so while taking walks around Central Park or riding one of New York's many public ferries, listening to himself in his headphones – playing, pausing, remembering. The irony of going from a stoic watchman to an orator is not lost on him. 'I used to be very, very quiet for a living. Now I just talk, like, half a million words every day.'
Over several months of rehearsals, Dromgoole taught Bringley how to translate his prose for a live audience. Sometimes, his advice was broad. 'Every thought that you're speaking, you're having for the first time,' Dromgoole told him. 'It has to pop, it can't be monotone.' Other times, the director homed in on specific lines, telling Bringley to deliver them with 'more violence' or 'less piety'. 'Sometimes he reaches for cosmic statements,' Dromgoole says of Bringley's writing, 'and sometimes that works, but that always has to be fed by a bedrock of specificity, and banality, and plain and boring details.'
In particular, the director was keen to include more details about life as a guard to balance Bringley's more philosophical musings. For instance, Met guards walk so far each day that they're paid a 'hose allowance' of $80 (£62) a year for socks. In one chapter of his book, Bringley recalls being told by a wizened older colleague that 12 hours standing on wood floors is like eight hours on marble. 'As well as the big questions about art and life, you want it to have just information about procedure,' says Dromgoole. 'It's lovely in that it does open up those big questions, but you just have to get the balance right.'
During the play, Bringley will once again don his old dark-blue suit – the uniform of the Met guards. He was adamant that his former colleagues should be among the first to see his play, and for free. However, when he put it to the producers, they suggested a meagre discount. 'Ten per cent,' he says, incredulous. 'I was like, 'You cannot offer these people a 10 per cent discount.'' Luckily, someone had the idea of inviting them to the dress rehearsal, which is happening the day after our conversation. When I speak to Dromgoole afterwards, he describes the night as 'terrific'. 'Because everything he said about them in the book is true... They were a truly, astonishingly, genuinely various group of people.' Seeing them all in a room, he said, 'You'd never guess what the connection was.'
Of course, revisiting his memoir has meant Bringley inhabiting a younger version of himself – one that is still grieving. Has it been an emotional process, living in those shoes again? 'It has,' he says, pausing thoughtfully. 'It's your job as an actor, when you are actually performing it, to relive the things that you're talking about – and some of the things are painful, and some of the things are beautiful.' It's all in the pursuit of making a human connection. He's hoping people will leave the theatre feeling 'like they really experienced something', not just a man giving an art history lecture. 'Even the parts that are about being a museum guard, that's all true of anyone who walks into a museum and spends a few hours in solitude, or out in the woods,' he says. 'That is something that feels numinous, that feels beyond words, that feels somehow more elemental. And I'm trying to kindle that feeling on stage.'