Reviews West End & Central Published 6 January 2013

The Master and Margarita

Barbican Theatre ⋄ 14th December 2012 - 19th January 2013

Bulgakov’s upside down world.

Alice Saville

A Frankenstein’s monster of disparate elements, animated by its trademark blend of technological wizardry and electric physical theatre, Complicite’s co-production of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel is a daunting affair; long, dense and emotionally demanding, it plunges the viewer into an upside-down world of bureaucratic misery and Biblical reference, rewarding concentration with a fascinatingly rich look at both the Soviet Union’s institutions, and the subversive cultures that they tried to efface.

Director Simon McBurney’s notes make the point that where the play seems like a surreal, morphine driven fairground ride to the Western eyes that drink in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in the Soviet Union Bulgakov is seen as a satirist, not a fantasist, all too tied to grim reality. One of the most frightening elements of Communist societies is the sharp parallels that can be drawn across times and countries, the universality with which one vast system imposes itself on disparate cultures to leave the individual pinned, trapped, punished and surveyed.

Bulgakov’s novel, written and rewritten from the late 1920s onwards, features the same pedantic, circular literary committees that shape Milan Kundera’s Slowness, the marginalisation of dissidents as lunatics, trapped in asylums that drives Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, and crossing continents, the same agonising crushing of the courageous individual that meets Jung Chang’s father in Wild Swans, against which ‘Cowardice is the only sin’. The enormous Barbican theatre can feel defeatingly soulless – but this sense of alienation is put to good use by Es Devlin’s design. Her set is a faceless facade that eliminates the distinctly Russian in favour of a timeless imaginative space of bricked-up windows, opened by individual projections, then effaced entirely in swirling snowstorms of light or falling walls.

Two parallel plots interlock and compete for primacy; in one, the Master (Paul Rhys) struggles against a world of literary bureaucracy, his life flurried by the appearance of the demonic Woland and his retinue. Late in the narrative, his Margarita (Susan Lynch) appears, their love first drowning then submerged by the twin systematic and chaotic systems that surround them. A second plot, first confined to short interludes, then coming to dominate the play’s loose structure, deals with Pontius Pilate’s (Tim McMullan) cowardice, a symbolic centrepiece that emphasises the interrupted and inconclusive, playing with religious imagery to provide an alternative image of the corrupting force of secular power.

The large cast handle the constant changes from asylum to office, apartment to underworld with dreamlike flexibility, massing and disappearing across a set in constant flux, with characters melding together at relentless pace. Admirably complex, still, some elements are over-complicated; large scale projections of characters’ expressions are more Hollywood drive-thru than subtly illuminating, while the intervention of puppetry is often distracting rather than illuminating. In particular, Behemoth the sweary cat on sticks felt like a deeply misjudged moggy, both overwhelming Woland’s quiet presence, and restraining his handlers from creating the carnivalesque physical chaos expected from an infernal retinue.

This play is inflated to bursting point with themes and ideas, threatening, particularly in the Margarita-driven second half, to escape comprehensible ground altogether in favour of a Nutcracker romp across fantasy skies. But although its ambition, gimmickery and scale risk the loss of its satirical force, Bulgakov’s novel battles through in an awe-inspiring salvo against the constraints of socialist – or anyone else’s – realism.

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Alice Saville

Alice is editor of Exeunt, as well as working as a freelance arts journalist for publications including Time Out, Fest and Auditorium magazine. Follow her on Twitter @Raddington_B

The Master and Margarita Show Info


Directed by Simon McBurney

Link http://www.barbican.org.uk/

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