Theatre

Proclaimed by the British Medical Journal as one of the first, and most explicit portraits of schizophrenia in literature, ‘Diary of a Madman’ isn’t just an extraordinary sketch of one man’s insanity. Written in 1834, Nikolai Gogol’s dark, comedic short is also a pithy depiction of the gnawing tedium of life six links from the bottom of the administrative food chain. And it’s made painfully familiar in Fail Better’s accomplished, one-man performance.

Through a series of diary entries written over the course of a year, it tells the story of Axenty Ivanovich (played by an enchanting Christopher Tester) a class-obsessed, middle-ranking civil servant in Tsarist Russia whose ascent to imagined greatness coincides with his descent into madness. The play begins with humorous pedantry – it takes several minutes of obsessive tidying, rigorous clothes-folding and pencil-over-blank-page-hovering before Ivanovich utters his first words. But the laughter soon gives way to something more sinister. An unrequited crush on his superior’s daughter seems to trigger a latent psychosis, culminating in a series of disturbing, albeit imagined events (the murder of a talking dog that ruminates on his desperate position, his discovery that he’s actually the King of Spain) before he is committed to an asylum.

Under Jonathan Heron’s terse direction Tester (who adapted the text for stage with Heron) offers an absorbing performance in this Beckettian drama, even if he doesn’t appear as comfortable in despair as he is in comedy and frantic derangement. Aided by Dave Thwaites’ clever lighting design, Nomi Everall’s cut-away bedroom set perfectly captures the claustrophobic mania that envelopes the affecting narrative, a reminder that madness sits dangerously close to us all.