THE MASTER & MARGARITA

About the show

MAGIC, MAYHEM, AND A BOOK THAT CAN’T BE BURNT – A CLASSIC OF LITERATURE LETS FLY AT BELVOIR. An actor enters with a battered copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and begins to read aloud from the opening chapter… We’re in a city run by fools and mediocrities. Elites protect their power, thinkers squabble over trivia, everyone is consumed by greed and materialism. And sitting on a park bench in this city is the Devil himself. Why is he here? The story that follows is wild, joyful and magnificent. The tale unfurls from ancient Galilee to Stalin’s Moscow, via a giant talking cat, a mad novelist, a ruthless officer of the secret police… At its centre is Margarita, who has to become a witch in order to save a lost manuscript – and us all. Written in secret in the gloom of repression, passed around under the nose of the state police, The Master and Margarita became a legend long before it was published. Now it is a phenomenon of world literature, celebrated for its insistence that love and imagination* will always triumph over those who want to shut us down. In the darkest days of the first lockdown we gathered a group of actors and read aloud from this book. Magic happened. Bulgakov was first and foremost a playwright. Banned from the theatre, he let his theatrical imagination run riot in a secret novel. We’re turning it back into theatre, and we can’t wait to show it to you. – Eamon.