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.”

What started as drinks to celebrate successes and soften stresses became all-consuming. From drinking a few nights a week, Sean slid into daily drinking, morning drinking, and ultimately losing control over the life he had so carefully built.

Looking back, he’s painfully honest: the alcohol didn’t make him better at his job. It made him less reliable, less sharp, and less present — both in work and in life.

“Maybe I thought I was funnier or smarter with three drinks in me, but the sad truth is, I wasn’t.”

Today, The White Chip tells that story – but not as a tragedy. It’s full of the dark humor and messy hope that comes with real recovery. And it’s universal: after every performance, Sean meets audience members who say it reminded them of their parent, sibling, friend – or themselves.

“Everybody knows somebody. Yet we don’t even nearly talk about it enough.”

Sean knows standing in front of an audience night after night with his own story is terrifying. Every show is a reminder of how deeply stigma and shame can run. But it’s also a reminder of resilience.

His goal isn’t to moralise, but to offer a hand out of the dark: to show that recovery is messy, nonlinear, and completely possible.

“It really doesn’t matter how low you’ve gotten — you can always turn it around.”

And this summer in London, when the curtain rises on The White Chip, Sean Daniels’ next act begins: not just surviving his past, but helping others imagine a different future.