Bedlam is inspired by a year in the life of Richard Dadd, a great Victorian painter and inmate of London’s Bethlem Hospital. It’s a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry. In 1842 Dadd took a Grand Tour of Europe and the Middle East. Within a year he had become a devotee of the god Osiris, and then become a killer, acting under the assumed direction of the Egyptian divinity.
