The Next Round: Sean turned recovery into theatre

When Sean Daniels decided to change his relationship with alcohol, he turned to what he knew best: theatre.

His play, The White Chip, shares his story - and the community that helped him find his way to recovery.

Welcome to The Next Round, the podcast that explores what people did next.

While some keep their post-booze lives quiet, others shout them loud and proud, helping themselves - and inspiring you.

Like Sean, his play The White Chip is moving on too: transferring from Off-Broadway to the Off-West End this summer.

Could he have written a play while still drinking? Well, yes - until he couldn’t.

As a professional artist and director, Sean found healing by translating the chaos of his recovery into something tangible and transformative – a play.

Today, Sean’s autobiographical show, The White Chip, is not just another production. It’s a raw, hilarious, and hopeful exploration of addiction and recovery, set to debut at London’s Southwark Playhouse. But it’s also a testament to what happens when you take your darkest moments and create a light for others to follow.

“The art form did help to save me, because it was a way to try to process what happened.”

For Sean, getting sober didn’t mean leaving creativity behind – it meant reclaiming it. Early on in recovery, on just his third day of sobriety, he wrote a monologue trying to capture his confusion and pain. That piece remains almost untouched in the final version of the play. Writing gave him a lifeline, a way to understand a collapse that seemed impossible to explain at the time.

He also poured his energy into community work, founding the Recovery Arts Project, an initiative using theatre to change the narrative around addiction. It’s part of Sean’s larger mission: not just to tell his story, but to reshape how society talks about addiction and creativity.

“The opposite of addiction isn’t abstinence – it’s community.”

Through his work, Sean challenges one of the most persistent myths: that great artists must suffer for their art, and that alcohol fuels creativity.

“The idea that part of what it costs you to be a really great artist is that you have to destroy your life – that’s 100% not true.”

Sean’s journey into addiction mirrored the glamorous chaos of the theatre world: late nights, endless parties, endless justification. At first, he says, drinking seemed to fuel his success, making him a more “fun” director, a better networker, someone who could juggle 4 a.m. drinks and 9 a.m. meetings with ease. Until it didn’t.

“It worked for me until it didn’t, which is a pretty standard version of the story.”

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