‘Some thoughts sustain you; others can kill you,’ says Bert Wilkins, in another life-and-death situation. He faced a Turkish firing squad, survived severe frostbite and a polar bear attack, and then was fearless at the Western Front where he earned the nickname ‘The Mad Photographer’ – from the Germans – all before he was thirty years old.

Peter Maddern’s script covers just a few years of the man’s adult existence in this first part of a trilogy. Stephen Schofield is outstanding as the almost-fearless explorer, on stage for the whole performance, alone but for the briefest of moments.