At the opening performance of this year's Daliangshan Theatre Festival in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture of Sichuan province, the first line of a production from Georgia in Diary of a Madman rang out across the stage: "As long as I still have a single kopek in my pocket, I can't stop myself from going. But some of our colleagues are such fools: they never set foot in a theater," taken directly from Nikolay Gogol's famous novella.

On stage, Poprishchin, a low-ranking, curly-haired civil servant, wakes from a dream on a bare iron bed, facing a harsher reality.

This 19th-century tale was brought to the Daliangshan stage by Levan Tsuladze, a leading figure in Georgian theater. This adapted performance marked its Chinese premiere.

"Gogol himself was a little man," Tsuladze says. "Even though he was a literary genius, nobody knew it at the time. He was alone, without a wife or children, and out of sync with the world. Only such people can truly feel the world."

The production uses 25 kilograms of newspapers: at first, the protagonist holds a single sheet, then a growing pile gradually engulfs the stage until the actor dives into it, struggling for air.

"What drowns us is information. In Gogol's time, it was newspapers; today, it may be the device in your hand. If we can find something in that overwhelming flow that frees our spirit, then we win."