Meister und Margarita

How does evil come into the world? In any case, the devil is on the loose in the city. Together with his two assistants – one of them in the form of a giant cat – he wreaks havoc in the metropolis, Moscow in the 1930s. The diabolical trio exposes corrupt greed, betrayal and hypocrisy. Only Margarita and her lover, the Master, author of a banned novel, are spared.

Mikhail Bulgakov, born in Kyiv in 1891, died in Moscow in 1940, where he had been writing his novel since 1928, ‘condemned to silence’ under Stalinist repression and censorship, with no prospect of publication. A writer in isolation, powerless to do anything, imagines a devil who brings the conditions of an autocratic system to life with his powerful language. When ‘The Master and Margarita’ was published posthumously in 1966, the novel became a cult classic: many learned it by heart, and the censored passages circulated underground.

The Master and Margarita, this real-fantastic novel, is a labyrinth that is easy to enter but difficult to find your way out of; it is intoxicating and anarchic, dark and funny, moving, confusing and enlightening. It names the greatest of all sins in the world: cowardice.

Jette Steckel, who most recently brought Mephisto to the stage of the Kammerspiele after Vaterlosen (both invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen), once again stages a major political work with The Master and Margarita.

“Certainly, man is mortal, but that’s not the half of it. The worst thing is: he’s mortal all of a sudden. That’s the crux of the matter! Man can’t even say what he’s going to do that self-same evening.”

– from “The Master and Margarita”