★★★★
It’s great to see a show develop and grow, and returning to see 2023 Bounce Award winner Mari Crawford’s Bipolar Badass, it’s heartening to see the theatre-maker honing her craft.
The autobiographical show details Crawford’s experience of having Bipolar. Where it came from, how it manifests and how she deals with it. She is a gifted performer, inhabiting her family members, engaging us as a friend would, whilst talking about personal and difficult stuff.
I particularly liked the recordings of her diary entries that played over; this documentary style brings a reality to what we are witnessing. As do the 1000’s of milligrams of pill bottles strewn about the stage.
There’s some deep resonances in the play, especially when she talks of those who lost their lives to mental illness, such as Robin Williams, who actually took his life 14 years to the day this Edinburgh run started (August 11th).
Mari is asked by mental health charities and foundations to perform her show for Doctors and professionals, and it’s no wonder why. Crawford has made an important piece of work, not only as a piece of theatre but as a vital tool for understanding a condition that is still misrepresented in the media.
As someone with a Bipolar diagnosis themselves, her story of personifying the condition, as a dragon, and the way she riffs with that, made the play for me. Mari takes the subject seriously, but never makes it all about herself – it’s a very healing work!
Bipolar Badass is on at theSpace (multiple venues) until August 23rd
