About This Show
Diaries of Madmen is based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel Diary of a Madman and composer’s Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s personal diaries. Famous farcical short story by one of the greatest Russian writers Nikolai Gogol, is a funny and brutal exploration of a civil servant’s Poprishchin struggle to keep a grip on reality. Another civil servant Piotr Tchaikovsky, who later became one Russia’s most celebrated composers, also had a complicated relationship between his inner world and reality. His personal diaries reveal his daunting self-doubt, suicidal thoughts and loneliness. Madness might mean a failure to find your proper place in the world, or the compulsion to occupy a place to which you’re not entitled. Diaries of a Madmen exposes a man’s longing to find such a place for himself, a place where he is visible, where he matters, and above all, belongs.
Director Konstantin Kamenski combined the stories of two civil servants, and together with the designer Irina Gluzman, explored the relationship between genius and madness, hopelessness and the desire to escape into the imaginary world. Performed in Russian with English surtitles.
