Geoffrey Rush took home the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA this year for The King's Speech and came close to an Oscar as well. Ultimately, it's probably fair to say that the Australian film and theater star was up for these awards because of his big-screen break, 1996's Shine, which netted him an Academy Award for his role as a mentally ill pianist. At the time, many (at least outside Australia) wondered where this rough, sad-faced fellow had come from.
As it turns out, Rush got the role in Shine because of another portrayal of mental illness: as the frustrated clerk Poprishchin in an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's groundbreaking 1835 short story "Diary of a Madman." In December 2010, Rush and director Neil Armfield revived the production, as Armfield's swan song as artistic director of Sydney's Belvoir theater. They have brought it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a monthlong run.
Rush doesn't always play men pushed to the extreme, but there's always at least a slight edge to his characters, even to a likable family man like The King's Speech's Lionel Logue. Rush is one of those "dangerous" actors almost guaranteed to take you somewhere faintly nerve-wracking; yet at the same time he expresses a perpetual warmth that makes you root for him. All the more terrible, then, is the descent into insanity he portrays so antically in Madman, even more so because for the bulk of the play his Poprishchin is such delightful company.
Photo by Heidrun Lohr
So is Tuovi, the housekeeper, the largest of three supporting roles played with extravagant ardour by the wonderful Yael Stone. As the lights come up on Catherine Martin's lurid, angular set, Tuovi is washing the floor of our antihero's attic apartment. The character, a bare mention in the short story, has here been developed into an important foil for our clerk, who would otherwise be addressing the audience directly without a break. She's also a funny and poignant creation in her own right, a voluble immigrant from Finland who gets the occasional grudging Russian lesson from Poprishchin while trying so hard, loudly but incomprehensibly, to be helpful and friendly.
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