The Master and Margarita

Which elements of this enormous novel - speaking as it does of love, of art and of politics - which elements do you hang on to when adapting the work for the Palais de Pape? Simon McBurney has decided to be faithful to the decidedly deconstructed construction of The Master and Margarita and to its narrative, which hurtles from Moscow to Jerusalem and from Heaven to hell. From this vast profusion, he has found a theatrical form and cleared a path to follow three intermingled stories, stories whose ends and whose connections will not become clear until the end of this looking-glass tale. In all this, the director permits himself all the elements which go to make up Bulgakov's writing: the passion and compassion of The Master and of Margarita in their love and in their freedom; the bitter and delirious comedy of the social and political satire; the clear-eyed and tragic attitude of a writer to his work; even the poetic and dream-like images which whirl the characters off into a fantastic other world. The Master is that solitary and oppressed writer in the image of a  Bulgakov crushed by the tyrannical madness of Stalinist power;  Margarita, that amorous, whole and courageous woman. Simon McBurney's power lies in his ability to combine the traditional crafts and methods of the theatre with the most sophisticated modern technology; so he can bring a horse to life with a handful of chairs but equally have his actors fly across the Moscow sky without lifting a foot of the stage. He joyously mixes up Bulgakov's imagined universes: Moscow, where Stalin lurks and watches; Heaven and hell, where Satan utters unbearable truths; Jerusalem, where we find Pontius Pilate and a philosophical Jesus bound closely together; and a psychiatric hospital, a refuge for desperate and exhausted writers. Helped by the astonishingly assured work of his actors and creative team, McBurney daringly plunges us in seconds from one story to another, letting us navigate with ease this labyrinth of thought and emotion. A novel conceived during the recent past in a twentieth century full of horror; a novel which denounces the corruption of the mind and sets against it the motions of the heart; a timeless novel, shaking up the tendency to apathy which can sometimes take hold of the human race. The Master and Margarita gives Simon McBurney and Complicite the raw material for this generous, poignant and imaginative piece of theatre and demonstrates once again that literary and theatrical expression are amongst the most powerful means of communication invented by humankind. JFP

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was aged thirty-seven when, in 1928, he began writing The Master and Margarita, which was to become one of the most important works of twentieth century Russian literature. At the time, he was banned from publication and his early works, The White Guard and Heart of a Dog had been confiscated. Under close surveillance from the Soviet political police, he was nonetheless left at liberty at the personal behest of Stalin, who allowed him to work as an assistant at the Moscow Arts Theatre although denying him a passport, which would have permitted him to leave the USSR. After burning the first manuscript of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov returned to the novel in 1931 and completed a second draft in 1936, which contained more or less all the main elements of the final version. Anxious to bring his work to perfection, he undertook a third version and then a fourth, which his wife would complete in 1941, a year after her husband's death. The work remained unpublished in its entirety in the Soviet Union until 1973. Simon McBurney has always been fascinated by the book, which is at the same time a love story and a political critique, a burlesque comedy and a fantasy tale. As he puts it, “The world we live in is an elaborate fiction. An imaginative construction, which we take for reality. It has to be the function of art to break through that reality. Perhaps that was never truer than under the regime of the former Soviet Union...”  And so it is this timelessly powerful work which he has chosen to adapt for the Cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace.

direction Simon McBurney
set Es Devlin
lighting Paul Anderson
sound Gareth Fry
costume Christina Cunningham
video Finn Ross
3D animation Luke Halls
puppertry Blind Summit Theatre

with David Annen, Thomas Arnold, Josie Daxter, Johannes Flaschberger, Tamzin Griffin, Amanda Hadingue, Richard Katz, Sinéad Matthews, Tim McMullan, Clive Mendus, Yasuyo Mochizuki, Ajay Naidu, Henry Pettigrew, Paul Rhys, Cesar Sarachu, Angus Wright

production Complicite
coproduction Festival d'Avignon, Barbican London, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Ruhrfestspiele (Recklinghausen)
in association with the Royal Theatre (Plymouth)
with the support of the British Council and PRG