I’m very remiss in not having yet reviewed Neil Armfield, Geoffrey Rush and David Holman’s exciting stage adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” now onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which I saw at opening. But, better late than never – and at least you can still see it.

Gogol’s short story takes, as you would expect, the form of a diary: a single character – Poprischin, a St. Petersburg clerk – talking, basically, to himself; descending into and, indeed, working himself into madness. Over the course of the play, Poprischin goes from borderline normalcy – odd, theatrical behavior, but not obvious insanity – to reporting on the conversations of neighborhood dogs, to fantasies of marriage to a woman far out of his league who barely knows he exists, to stealing and reading the correspondence of the talking canines, to concluding, when his marital hopes are dashed, that he is not who he thought he was, a St. Petersburg clerk, but the rightful King of Spain. At which point they come to take him away, ha ha, hee hee, ho ho, to the funny farm, where life is …

I say “working himself into madness” because, while the diary form gives us on the one hand the feeling that we are eavesdropping on his psyche, in fact a diary is a conscious creation of the diarist, and as such there is always the possibility that the particular form his madness takes is, in part, a consequence of having this peculiar kind of imaginary audience. The main clue to the theatricality of the diarist is the deterioration of the dates of the diary entries. For most of the story, they take the form of normal dates. But when Poprischin’s madness fully blossoms, with the conviction that he is, in fact, the King of Spain, the dates begin to manifest a madness of their own. “The Year 2000, 43rd of April.” “The 86th of Martober. Between day and night.” “Date none. The day had no date.” “The 1st.” This is not verisimilitude – you would not expect an actual madman, suffering from delusions, to date his diary entries in this manner. It’s a theatrical gesture, the madman reveling in the freedom afforded by his madness.

The stage adaptation picks up and runs with this theatrical aspect of diary-writing, and runs about as far as one could possibly go. Rush’s Poprischin is got up like a clown, in hideously colored rags, bright red tufts of hair, and green eyeshadow; once bitten on the proboscis by his canine nemesis, he even acquires a red nose. And from the moment he appears onstage, he begins to declaim. He plays off the lighting, which careens expressionistically from ambient to simulated candlelight to spots and harsh shadows. He plays off the band, which plays off him as well, sometimes supporting him in his madness, sometimes mocking him. He plays off the audience (at one point asking a member to hold his bowl of soup). He flounces. He waggles. His comic timing is impeccable – and this is in no way a “camp” performance; all these theatrical gestures are entirely sincere. Rush’s Poprischin is enormously entertaining, and probably could have made a good thing of it, the only problem being that we, the audience, are the first figments of his mad imagination – before he starts hearing talking dogs, before the mantle of monarchy descends, he rants, jests, capers, incessantly … for the imaginary us.

Entertaining though it is, it’s not a pretty picture for a writer – especially a blogger – to confront.

The major difference between the stage and page, then, is precisely this: that on the page we think we are real, while on the stage we know we aren’t. Reading the diary, we think we are eavesdropping, and we are interested in the course of his madness – in the endless slights at the office, the hopeless solitude of his condition. We feel pity, but we don’t really feel implicated. (Perhaps we would if we were 19th-century Russians.) We think that we are eavesdropping, but we aren’t – the madman wrote this diary for us, even though he doesn’t know who we are. By staging the diary, this becomes explicit, unavoidable. Rush talks to us, directly. Performs for us. Hands us bowls of soup. But, of course, in the world of the play, we don’t exist. And talking to people who aren’t there, asking them to hold our soup – well, that’s the behavior of a madman. Which he is. So we are distanced from him, feel less pity. But, since he is doing all of this for us, we are far more implicated. Reading the diary, you don’t think “I drove him mad.” Watching it on stage, after a while, you do.

The pity that we feel reading the diary is, in the stage version, ascribed to a Finnish servant, who cleans (sort of) Poprischin’s garret, brings him soup, and doesn’t understand enough Russian to apprehend his descent into madness until he has gone very deep indeed. But even before she knows he’s mad, she pities him – and her persistence coupled with his total lack of interest in her attentions are, really, the heart of the piece. (She’s played lovingly by Yael Stone, who also plays the daughter of the Director at the office, who Poprischin fantasizes about marrying, and a fellow inmate at the asylum.)

Where the stage production falls most notably short of the story is in the depiction of Poprischin’s incarceration in the insane asylum. Rush’s monologue is taken almost verbatim from the original text, and yet the impact is very different. On the page, we have been with Poprischin all along, eavesdropping on his descent into madness, and our pity follows him into the asylum and the torments that await him there. The progression is natural. On the stage, though, we go from a nervous apprehension that we are, in a way, the cause of this theatrical madness, to a world that we emphatically did not create. We do not pour cold water on Poprischin’s head, and beat him when he says he is Ferdinand the VIII. We are not implicated in the tortures of the asylum – what happens to him is done to him by nameless others. And so what is supposed to draw us in, to pity, actually pushes us away, and the wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth all come off as rather melodramatic.

But notwithstanding that the ending doesn’t quite work (and that the show feels like it is ending repeatedly in the last fifteen minutes, only to go on), this is a marvelous piece of theatre, a triumph not only for Geoffrey Rush but for everyone involved in the production. It’s a thorough reconceiving of the original piece, that stays true to its spirit but also true to the nature of the stage, and how it differs from the page. Crossing that divide inevitably changes the work, in this case dramatically so (literally). But while some things are lost as a consequence, other things, perhaps more important things, are discovered.

As a final note, various reviewers have compared this performance to Geoffrey Rush’s turn a couple of years ago in “Exit the King,” which unfortunately I missed. But what I recalled – more by way of contrast than by way of comparison – was Bill Camp’s stage realization of the Dostoevsky’s underground man, which I saw at the Baryshnikov Arts Center last year (and didn’t review for this blog because … I don’t know why). The two mad diarists make interesting companions on the page, but it would also be instructive to look at how each was brought to life on the stage – and what changed in each case about our understanding of the character, and in what way he reflects back on us and our complicity in his condition. Camp’s underground man was calculated to disgust us, which is very true to the text (and not what one gets from the Gogol at all), but there was also a palpable reaching out, a desperation to be heard without an actual ability to connect to or comprehend other souls. Camp’s underground man cries out for an audience he knows isn’t there – and as soon as he has the chance to connect to an actual person (the prostitute), he turns on her, savagely. Rush’s madman, by contrast, doesn’t turn savagely on his housekeeper. He doesn’t need her. He solved the problem that nobody is listening to him. He invented us.