Just as they did with "Exit the King" two seasons back, star Geoffrey Rush and director Neil Armfield have brought an unconventional, bracing production to our shores from their native Australia. This stage version of Nikolai Gogol's 1853 short masterpiece "The Diary of a Madman"—the adaptation is credited to David Holman, with Armfield and Rush—is a revival of a 1989 production, by the Sydney-based theater company Belvoir, in which Rush starred.
Now in its American debut, the show shatters our expectations of what a satisfying evening in the theater should look and sound like. In New York, we are so used to safe representational dramas that when a play shatters the fourth wall and employs presentational elements, it's scary—but here it's scary good. Armfield's staging and Rush's performance go far beyond realism, combining influences of the circus and Brecht to create a kind of existentialist cabaret. Rush is perfectly in character as the titular lunatic, yet he acknowledges the audience and the two musicians (the marvelous Paul Cutlan and Erkki Veltheim) seated in a box off to the side of Catherine Martin's nightmarish set, which depicts a depressing St. Petersburg tenement attic and a stark asylum. Mark Shelton's masterful lighting aids with the transitions.
Gogol's novella builds on a common theme in Russian literature: the little everyman crushed by grinding bureaucracy. Low-level clerk Aksentii Poprishchin pompously fancies himself a gentleman and has fallen in love with his boss's daughter Sophia, who doesn't even know he exists. His only real companionship is provided by his landlady's maid Tuovi, a Finnish immigrant who dotes on him, though he disdains her as a "foreign idiot." Sophia's rejection and an oppressive class system eventually drive Poprishchin mad. First he imagines that he hears conversations between Sophia's dog and another canine, then he believes he is the king of Spain after reading that the throne is empty. He is finally taken away to what he thinks is the royal palace in Madrid but is actually a madhouse.
Just as he enlivened an existential rumination as the dying monarch in "Exit the King," Rush turns what could have been a dry literary recitation into an unforgettable tour de force. Costumed by Tess Schofield in attempted threadbare elegance, Rush resembles a clown: white-face makeup with bits of color under the eyes, bright-red fright wig, and red nose (the result of a bite from one of those talking dogs). At first, his performance is clownish as well. He's magnificently funny performing Chaplinesque bits of business: Watch as he imitates everything from a cow to a cricket. His inspired reading of the imaginary correspondence between the two canines—at first jubilant over finding it and then exasperated at the blandness of its contents—is worth the price of admission. Yet Rush also strongly puts across Poprishchin's petty nature and heartbreakingly obsessive love for Sophia.
In the second act, as madness overtakes the little man, Rush shifts gears. Gone is the amusing clown and in his place is a raving lunatic. The writer James Goldman said that the mark of a great actor is danger, and Rush certainly possesses it. I was actually afraid he was going to run up the aisle and attack me. As the madman is cruelly beaten and doused with ice water in the asylum, Rush shifts back to the pathetic creature of Act 1 with protean ease. As the energetic Tuovi, the haughty Sophia, and Tatiana, an animallike inmate, Yael Stone is just as astonishing in her shape-altering ability. These are two amazing performances in a breathtaking production. Miss it at your peril.
Presented by Brooklyn Academy of Music at the BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Brooklyn, N.Y. Feb. 16–March 12. Tue.–Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (718) 636-4100 or www.bam.org.