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Complicite's "Master and Margarita" at the Barbican
Published on 3rd September 2013
Part of the reason that I queued up for Complicite’s latest show - twice, having failed to get a return ticket the first time - was pure curiosity. How on earth did Simon McBurney plan on getting it on stage? Mikhail Bulgakov’s politically charged novel is a surreal and savagely acerbic philippic against the totalitarian state that he inhabited, with plotlines jerking back and forth from Stalinist Moscow, to a hallucinogenic soirée in Hell, to the trial of Jesus. But, in spite of its kaleidoscopic surrealism, McBurney has attempted to stage the unstageable - and, for the most part, it’s eye-wateringly good. Filling the cavernous Barbican stage with sound, light, movement, and Artaudian “flaming arrows”, a series of coups-de-théatre are unfolded with the sort of consciously sensationalist spectacle of which Antonin himself would be proud. Heads roll across the stage in slow motion to the spine-tingling strains of the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”, naked bodies fly over the Moscow skyline, and at the heart of the anarchy lie Satan and his depraved entourage, with Paul Rhys contributing a gloriously caustic Lucifer in Karl Lagerfeld shades and beret. But this is not just theatre as technical exercise - the production does ask more profound questions than “How are we going to stage this?”. Filming closeups of the actors and projecting them in realtime onto the towering backdrop effortlessly evokes Bulgakov’s aim for simultaneous recognition of the individual, the social, the universal, and the metaphysical. The saturation of the novel in politics also coruscates, in the idea that mercy is the epitome of rebellion against the brutal cruelty of Stalinist Russia. But, sadly, the successive climaxes of the second half gradually become an onslaught rather than a spectacle, and the series of about four final codas are marred by longueur. As the adrenaline-fuelled wonder at the technically jaw-dropping first act begins to wear off, one does wonder if a slightly ungainly puppet with a cor-blimey cockney accent lives up to the phantasmagorical terror conjured by Bulgakov’s description of Behemoth, Satan’s feline equerry. Complicite make a thoroughly enjoyable stab at this chimerical masterpiece, but the perfect production of it remains elusive. Maybe, next to the overpoweringly psychedelic world that Bulgakov created, it always will.
