"Diary of a Madman' in Brooklyn

His tattered coat is blood red. His threadbare suit is shiny black, with fraying knees. His loopy cravat is yellowed satin; his wild eyes are shadowed in green.

To top it all, he wears a red clown nose and orange tufted hair as bright as his overcoat. He's a Technicolor specter, and as he careens across the stage, you simply can't take your eyes off him.

Who is that exotic character, and who is bringing him to such extraordinary life? Why, it's Aksenty Poprishchin, Gogol's immortal Russian government clerk, played with unparalleled panache by the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, better known lately for his performance as George VI's speech therapist in The King's Speech.

This theatrical tour de force has been years in the making. More than 22 years ago, two young theater artists (Rush and the Australian director Neil Armstrong) met in a seedy showground bar in Sydney and conceived the idea of adapting their favorite short story"“Gogol's The Diary of a Madman"“ for the stage. The resulting production in 1989 was a great success and defined their respective theatrical futures: Armstrong went on to found the award-winning Belvoir Theatre Company in Sydney (working with Cate Blanchett and other celebrated Australian actors), and Rush was cast in a film called Shine as a pianist who suffers a mental breakdown, a role that catapulted him into instant world-wide recognition.

Now the two collaborators have revived their uniquely creative adaptation of The Diary of a Madman. Gogol's creepy classic, written in 1835, recounts the story of a 19th-Century bureaucrat in St. Petersburg. Aksenty Poprishchin is an insignificant cog in the great Russian bureaucratic wheel who passes his miserable and monotonous days writing in his diary.

Talking dogs

Poprishchin is the definitive urban "little man" of modern times. He's the anonym that inspired Dostoevsky (Notes from an Underground), Chekhov (On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco), Zoshchenko (Man in a Bathhouse), Bulgakov (Heart of a Dog), and Kafka (Metamorphosis) to write of characters driven to the brink of madness by an uncaring world. Poprishchin's numbing daily ritual has taken its toll. "Why can't one single thing in this life happen as I wish?", he writes in his diary. But it doesn't.

Amid Poprishchin's life of anomie and humiliation, his only beacon of light is his fantasy of Sophia, the daughter of his department director. In his gradual descent into madness, Aksenty starts hearing conversations on the street between Sophia's dog and another mutt named Fifi. Desperate to learn more about Sophia, he procures "letters" written between the two dogs, revealing Sophia's impending marriage to a member of the Czar's court. As Aksenty descends deeper into madness, he harbors delusions of grandeur that provide the story's stunning conclusion.

Even readers familiar with Gogol's tale won't be prepared for this inspired stage adaptation's startling surprises. Rush and director Neil Armfield have turned the story into a tragic vaudeville, both hilarious and harrowing, acted out with spectacular theatricality.

Inspired seediness

The set itself— Poprishchin's seedy attic garret, with buckets strewn around the floor to catch the roof leaks— is as vivid as Poprishchin's costume elements. The only furniture is a metal table downstage and metal cot upstage, punctuated by a few random chairs. A towering pile of government papers stretches from floor to ceiling. A lone attic window lets in a sickly yellow light. In violent contrast, the walls are screaming red; the ceiling is a shocking green.

In this miserable garret we chart the unraveling of Poprishchin's mind, as told through his diaries. The empty space becomes a circus ring, where Rush acts out this unraveling, dancing and prancing around the stage, his body expressive, animated, contorted in mime and clown movement. The physicality of the performance is breathtaking in its grace, and in its horror, too, as the madness overtakes Aksenty's body.

You may have seen Rush and Armfield's 2009 Broadway collaboration in Ionesco's absurdist Exit The King, a Belvoir production (and another tale of delusion). Rush's genius at portraying madness, with its polarities of hilarity and heartbreak, with the comedic and tragic in terrifying sync, has been the backbone of his career.

Feckless servant woman

The Diary of A Madman could have been written as a one-man-show "“ and, indeed, Rush's skills could sustain it. But the ingenuity of this adaptation lies in its use of a second character (or rather, an actress playing several characters), as well as the presence of two musicians. Actress Yale Stone provides marvelous, absurdist comic relief as Tuovi, the feckless Finnish servant who serves Poprishchin his evening soup. Her attempts to speak to Poprishchin in halting Russian lapse into incomprehensible torrents of her native tongue "“ including at one point a hilarious rendering of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" in Finnish. She also plays the Sophia of Poprishchin's dreams with phantom-like elegance.

The use of the two-man orchestra is also inspired, employing a variety of instruments, including violin, clarinet, and a myriad of percussions (gongs, chimes, drums). In effect, the original score becomes a third live character on stage, both underscoring the dialogue and providing interludes that advance the narrative. When Poprishchin's cries are contrapunted with screeches of the violin's bow across the strings, the result is hair-raising, like Poprishchin's transformation itself.

On a recent visit to St. Petersburg, I walked down the Nevsky Prospekt, that grand "Champs Elysees" of the czarist Russian capital where The Diary of a Madman takes place. The promenade today is as grand as ever, but don't stray more than a block away. Behind that grand façade lurk thieves, rats and collapsing sidewalks. I could almost see little Poprishchin scurrying along the shadowy side streets, chasing after the dogs and their letters. Surely, I couldn't imagine anyone else playing him other than Geoffrey Rush.