The Master and Margarita

German by Thomas Reschke

The spring haze dawns over Moscow, rendering the view heavy and the senses sluggish. But there is something in the air. A literary editor falls under a tram, a poet ends up in a psychiatric ward and money is raining from the ceiling of a variety theatre. All that is left of the chairman of the theatre commission is his suit. The director of the variety theatre, however, has disappeared altogether. What or who is behind all this? Could it be the strange professor who suddenly turned up in the city with an illustrious entourage, posing as a specialist in black magic and claiming to have known Pontius Pilate personally? It doesn't take long to agree. They must be criminals or spies. Or are the powers of hell at work here? The phones are ringing off the hook.

Meanwhile, Margarita mourns the loss of her lover, the Master, who has disappeared off the face of the earth. The Master, however, has voluntarily checked himself into a psychiatric ward after his novel, which not coincidentally describes the story of a certain Pontius Pilate, was declared unfit to be printed. Margarita is also unaware that a conversation is taking place there between another recently admitted poet and her missing lover. Yet Margarita's and the Master's fate will soon take an almost supernatural turn that makes dream and reality merge indistinguishably.

»I am destroyed«, Bulgakov wrote in 1930 and asked the Soviet Union government for permission for him and his wife to leave the country. He shares the fate with his character of the Master in a harrowing way. Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and his death in 1940, was only published in censored form in 1966/67 and then achieved cult status in a very short time. Despite the superimposition of surrealist parodies on the real story, the parallels between the content of the novel and the period in which it was written did not escape readers. Bulgakov almost prophetically anticipated the Stalinist dictatorship on its way to the ‘Great Purge’ and its cruel consequences. The disappearance of people was real, as was the greed for favours. In the character of Margarita, however, Bulgakov sets a counterpoint of almost redemptive power. It is a story of emancipation par excellence that Margarita achieves by not only rebelling against repressive structures, but also overcoming the confines of gravity and death – albeit with the help of a magic ointment.

With her production of »The Master and Margarita«, Luise Voigt introduces herself for the first time as a director at the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar.

We would like to thank Minako Seki for her insight into the world of Butoh and her choreographic collaboration.