Several years ago, I had a conversation with the writer of a very well-received memoir, and told him that I was writing a book. Being a professional, he asked me the appropriate question: How much was your advance? When I confessed that I had neither an advance, nor a contract, nor a publisher, nor even an agent, he shook his head, wearily. Writing a book for money, he informed me, was low enough, but writing one for some other reason was madness. He wanted to know what manner of childhood trauma had led me to such a depressed condition. That there is some connection between creation and madness is an insight at least as old as the cults of Dionysus and Shiva. Around the time of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the eccentric artist became an affectation, and in our own time it has descended into an outright banality, not to mention an excuse for antisocial behavior indulged in by several generations of mfa students, teaching assistants, and bartenders with artistic pretenses. Let us then be grateful for Neil Armfield’s adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, which strangles that conceit.

The attraction here is, as has become customary, the borrowed glamour of the cinema, in the person of the Australian actor Geoffrey Rush, an ancient of the stage who currently looms large in the American cultural mind for his role in The King’s Speech, one of those fastidious anglophile-porn extravaganzas that win film awards for performing