Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

Cast: Robert Bowman.

In the end it doesn’t take much to make a person go mad and it’s not always the God’s who have the ability to do so before they destroy them, circumstances and love both can play their own distinctive part in the tragedy to come.

To witness madness first hand is something that a few might have seen or even suspected in others but to read it, to understand the slow mental breakdown and function of another human being in the form of written notes in a journal is quite another. In Living Pictures Productions adaptation of Gogol’s famous first person short story narrative, The Diary of a Madman, insanity is something that is not only a fall to which can come to us all but also the lofty elevated freedom that comes with it is captured with great sincerity by Robert Bowman’s reading beyond the margins imposed by society.

To hold sway over the minds of an audience for an hour with a text so fluid, so rich in its substance is always to be applauded. For Robert Bowman though it seems to go further, the fall from state of grace of a lowly clerk to the lofty insane heights imagined as the King of Spain to which Poprishchin finds himself is so well handled that the person in the stalls would not be admonished for wondering whether insanity is infectious, as contagious as a case of Chicken Pox, or if indeed it is them who is indeed mad. Within the plausible nature of it all, the affable geniality punctuated by outbursts of terrific magnitude, it all come crashing down as a veil is drawn over the rubble and rising dust being scattered over a wide and tumultuous area.

To read a madman’s diary is one thing, to live it, to breathe it in and revel amongst the dying synapses of a world that is vivid, bountiful in its texture and colour and yet understand it is all based on the corrupted mind is almost like drinking spirits before the legal age, it may be fun but at some point in the future it will colour your viewpoint and leave you with a sad sour taste in your mouth,

The Diary of a Madman is a terrific adaptation, one that really captures the point of the Edinburgh Fringe Theatre.

Ian D. H