Playing on the everyday madness

The stress, the noise, the disconnection — when people talk about cities nowadays, its negative aspects are often emphasized. There's a growing desire to escape and retreat into some countryside idyll, but director Li Yu pushes back against this romanticized idea of "escaping "urban life for a pastoral utopia.

"From the bottom of my heart, I don't believe that's the answer," he says.

One evening, Li stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows of a theater, looking out at an office building. As the lights inside were twinkling, the signs outside glowed, cars moved steadily along the road, and small restaurants lined the street.

"At that moment, I felt the city was truly beautiful. I wanted to use a playful, satirical tone to re-experience and reimagine the place where we live," he says, describing the moment when the idea for a new play occurred to him.

The first thing that came to mind was Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol. Li envisioned its famous characters rendered in a comic-book style, reflecting the absurdities and struggles of modern life.

The result is a new play, titled Mad Man's Diary, produced by Beijing's Star Theatres, which runs until May 30.

In Gogol's original, the protagonist is a middle-aged, low-level clerk fixated on social status, who gradually descends into madness. Through diary entries, he shares his delusions: believing that dogs can talk, and later imagining himself as the King of Spain.

Li's stage adaptation, which he both wrote and directed, is set in today's fast-paced world, in which people face constant pressure from work, relationship anxieties, and social expectations.

In this version, there are two characters: the Mad Man, an emotional, chaotic dreamer who represents the imagination, fantasy, and even delusion; and Doggie, practically the other half of the same mind, who symbolizes rationality, logic, and being grounded.

The play begins in hyperrealism, portraying ordinary objects from daily life, but as the Mad Man's fantasies take over, the stage transforms into a comic-book world, making use of stylized visuals, bold colors, exaggerated props, animation, and dramatic shifts in lighting and projection.

Li hopes to show that even in the stress and absurdity of city life, beauty and humor still exist.

In the production, the two endearing characters move through the urban landscape, facing strange and surreal situations. Together, they complain about their boss, grumble about work, chase after love, and search for happiness. They discuss dignity and equality — all through a humorous, lighthearted lens, offering the audience a cheerful and warm evening.

Li studied at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing, and later at the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts. He is now a director at the National Theatre of China.

"Directing a play is essentially about having a conversation with the audience," Li says. "In today's world, making a comedy means offering joy, warmth, and strength, and serves as a way to vent, to complain, to relieve stress."

"When I did the audition, I was asked to read a small paragraph from the script, which deeply intrigued me," says actor Chi Haozhen, who plays Doggie. "The lines resonated with me, and when we performed onstage, I could feel the audience connecting. It felt like we were all sharing a common experience, united by the pressures we face in life."

As one of the most popular venues in Beijing for small-scale productions, Star Theatres is a cozy setting with only about 100 seats. This intimacy allows the audience to be fully immersed in the performance.

"We run, jump, and move around the theater with the audience just steps away. It's challenging but fascinating," says Shan Guanchao, an actor with the National Theatre of China, who plays the Mad Man.

"There's a lot of humor in the play," Shan adds. "But by the end, the audience walks away with something deeper. When they give the actors their full attention and grasp the meaning of the lines, that is the magic of theater, the emotional resonance."