It started with something trivial. Not a psychedelic vision or a menacing voice: just the unremarkable noise of pebbles hitting a window. Trouble was, there were no pebbles, even though the noise seemed real. It was the first sign of psychosis – a symptom of the bipolar disorder that now, 12 years later, Mari Crawford knows she will live with for the rest of her life.

That permanence is the central theme of Bipolar Badass, an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Crawford, which sits somewhere in the intersection of comedy, education and theatre. The edges of the stage are marked out by pill bottles, symbolising the 32kg of active medication she calculates she’s taken over the years; the drugs do work, at least to an extent, but her condition is chronic and will never be cured. Coming to accept that is the arc of Crawford’s story, and it’s a journey she leads us on too.

We gain insight into the uncertainty of her life – things that don’t exist seem as real to her as she does to us, she explains – and the manic energy that sometimes consumes her, as she runs around the stage raving about the weather. She doesn’t sugar-coat it, but there is a kind of humour in play, when she talks about her literal Messiah complex or parodies ignorant medical commentators on Reddit. But there’s nothing remotely funny about her family’s history, told in a haunting memory shared by her father, nor in her first ever act of self-harm… which, like those pebbles that started it all, is a tiny and inconsequential step that signals something much greater.

The sparse presentation is effective – just Crawford, on her own, with the brightly-coloured pill bottles to separate our space from hers – and subtle lighting changes accentuate key moments well. One quibble is with the handful of voice memos we hear from Crawford’s past; they are important to the narrative but the audio is muffled, and there were meaningful-seeming sentences which I simply couldn’t decode. It’s ironic to suggest this in a show that’s all about authenticity, but recreating them on better equipment might be a smart move.

Bipolar Badass is a vital insight into the reality of a condition that’s alternately feared and romanticised – though of course, this is a personal account, and it’s important to note that not everyone’s experience is the same. It celebrates the positive moments, too: we hear about the brother who was there in the darkest hour, and the practical mother who made sacrifices for her daughter’s care. If, as Crawford suggests, the movies project a harmful vision of what it’s like to be bipolar, seeing this show might redress the balance. And the ultimate moral – about learning to love the parts of yourself you used to hate – is a powerful prescription for us all.