'Spending time in solitude feels somehow elemental'

In 2008, after the death of his brother, Patrick Bringley took a job as a security guard at the Met. He talks to Tom Murray about the one-man show inspired by his bestselling memoir

- Tom Murray

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-yearold 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.”