Barbican Theatre, London
14th Dec '12 - 19th Jan '13
“The
same passage read twice can double you up with laughter on one
reading, and shake you with its menace on the second. The moment you
decide what something means, it at once resists and seems to writhe
its way out of your grasp, revealing itself as something quite
different. But however stranger or contradictory, it always holds you
in its grip.”
-
Director Simon McBurney (from the programme)
This
stage adaptation is peppered by bureaucrats or busybodies pronouncing
Bulgakov's source novel “unpublishable” - despite the fact that
here they stand before us. Then, very near the end, it comes to be
called “unfinished”.
Which,
of course, it is. The history of a work of art gets inscribed over
the work itself, like a palimpsest. First contemporary history, then
the response of succeeding generations... deepening like a coastal
shelf. We all know the novel was never published during Bulgakov's
lifetime, a microcosm of the problems he faced in Stalin's Russia. We
all know it finally appeared in the Sixties and Mick Jagger wrote
'Sympathy For the Devil' after reading it. None of
that is in the novel itself. But it cannot do other than permeate the
book we now read, seeping through the pages like it's been left out
in the weather of history.
But to
stage an adaptation that tries to incorporate that expanded
perspective? That's a pretty audacious step; particularly when we're
talking about a work that's already multi-layered and metafictional,
that isn't especially long but still feels vast,
that interweaves plot strands on a scale that must have required an
industrial loom. Things were, in short, pretty bloody expanded to
start off with! But in fact it's made necessary precisely by
the novel's meta-fictional conceits and multi-levelled structure.
Of course it's unfinished, it was never intended
as a closed, complete, didactic work. It's a decision which leaves us
with a three-hour-plus performance, which is sometimes all too much
to take in. But it's the only way to go.
Notably
proceedings jump back and forth between a play,
where actors playing characters interact with each other in scenes,
and a performance, where figures take on roles to
address the audience – even speaking into stand-up microphones like
comperes.
If the
expanded perspective does tend to come more through the microphones,
things aren't so schematic as for one to represent the novel and the
other our reading of it. But putting the two different dramatic
devices side-by-side serves to remind us that both are at work.
At the
same time, one blending into the other... that's part of the point
too. Stage dressing is minimal enough to make Brecht blush. Rooms are
created by beams of light projected on the floor, actors navigating
through projected doorways like Cluedo counters. At one point a
secretary tries to explain how a door opens, going through the
possible options until crying in frustration “Just go in, there's
no door!” Like those beams of light, everything here shifts and
morphs.
Then
again... I've commented before how adaptations of polyphonic works
tend to unravel into one singular reading or other. It's like pulling
at a thread from a jumper, you don't end up with the essence of the
jumper, you end up without a jumper. Perhaps
there's something inevitable in that. To pick a petty but perhaps telling example, in the
novel everyone imagines the sinister stranger Woland to be foreign - but fails
to pin him to a country. In the play he must speak his lines and so
choose an accent. (Though if he picks German, naturally enough it's
heavily suggested he's not really German.)
This
production, to be fair, offers us two threads to tug. One we might
call the 'Singing Detective' reading. The titular
Master is the author of the book-within-the-book. Underlined by a
bookend structure, this suggests writing it has driven him crazy -
and he's now in an asylum feverishly dreaming the events, a tangle of
delusions where once there might have been straight thoughts in his
head. Characters don't just (as in the novel) repeat and echo each
others' lines, they swap actors and identities. (Chiefly,
significantly, the author and the diabolic antagonist Woland.) At
points there's nothing short of cacophony on stage. But as the author
recovers they are reconciled, characters merge, the panoply
coalescing into one another.
...which
is a pretty good reading. It's probably one any writer could
recognise. But I don't think it's the dominant reading here. Another
one overlays it.
In the
programme, Director Simon McBurney disdains the Sixties
hallucinogenic reading and comments “in the Soviet Union this novel
was not perceived as a fantasy at all. It was about their lives.”
All of
which may well be true. At the opening of the book, Woland scoffs at
the idea man no longer needs God as he can plan for himself. A
contemporary audience would doubtless have seen a reference to
Stalin's disastrous series of Five Year Plans.
However,
when I read the novel, I was struck by how un-Soviet the setting was,
how downright bourgeois the behaviour of the characters. It's stuffed
with poets and writers, not workers or dissidents. Berlioz, the first
character described in the first paragraph, is “well-fed and
bald... neatly clean-shaven” with a “decorous pork-pie hat.”
Of
course Bulgakov is not Orwell, and this book in particular is no
analogue of 'Animal Farm.' Whatever he is, Woland
is not Stalin. Besides, we're now in London, at a time where there's
no longer even such a thing as the Soviet Union. But of course
McBurney knows all that. In the opening, a Google Earth projection
flashes up to shows us precisely where the setting of Patriarch's
Ponds lies in Moscow. But the narrator then compares it to the more
familiar Russell Square in London. Despite the dynamic visual of the
first, it's the second which comes to seem more significant. McBurney has said his
aim was a “questioning the dominant narratives of our time, which
is what Bulgakov is doing [for his].” But in his keenness to avoid
both the post-Sixties freak-out and historical timepiece, he sets
himself up to step into a different snare.
The
two main parallel plot-lines are Bible times (the setting of the
Master's novel), and then-contemporary Soviet Russia. The production
tends to emphasise the contrasts between the time of Christ's
appearing and the Devil's, at a time and place where people were
atheists or put on a great show of it. Electricity crackles through
the production almost as much as Danny Boyle's recent version of
'Frankenstein'. Soviet Russia becomes the start of
our modern era, it's electrified trams starting a lineage that leads
directly to the iPhones in this audience's pockets. Soviet Russia is
seen as the onset of modernity, a lightning rod for a contemporary
kind of materialistic atheism. When Woland addresses the audience
from the Moscow stage, it's underlined he is actually addressing
us, here in this room. Microphone trumps staging.
This
view of Soviet Russia is almost a refreshing change from the standard
one of it as an aberration. We tend to look upon it armed with
hindsight, as a lumbering anachronism which somehow just about made
it into the end of the Eighties, the Neanderthal of modern times. Yet
the classic Stalinist argument, that the revolution took Russia into
the Twentieth Century, is on it's own terms correct. (Reader, please
note that qualifying clause!)
Ultimately,
despite the many good things you could say about this production, a
creditable flaw is still a flaw. McBurney goes to laudible lengths to
make the source material contemporary. But had he made it, as
intended, universal then it would have become
contemporary by default. Despite all the wacky modernist
metafictional stuff, Bulgakov's novel is at root a cross between a
parable and a fable – and parables tend to the timeless. In his stage speech,Woland asks “I'm not so much interested in the buses and
the telephones as in the much more important question – have the
Muscovites changed inwardly?” His ensuing misrule would suggest
not.
The
Biblical setting doesn't contrast against the then-contemporary
Moscow, they even share the same Easter setting. It's more that they
start out as separate stories which come to express the same timeless
truth.
In one
of Bulgakov's many structural strangenesses, the title-sharing
Margarita doesn't show up until half-way through. Delaying her
arrival until the second book of the novel may work to subliminally
remind us of the New Testament. Certainly she plays much the same
redemptive role as the Jesus figure Yeshua, rather than becoming
corrupted by the world achieving the very reverse. (Think for
example of the way both are reduced to nakedness.) Arguably her
powers are still greater than Yeshua's, and she's able to redeem
Woland himself.
In
some ways the nearest comparison to this adaptation might be David
Cronenberg's film of 'The Naked Lunch', not a film
version of another unadaptable novel so much as a mythopoetic account
of the writing of the book. It works as companion piece, not
adaptation. Confronted by an unstageable novel the production instead
focuses on everything around the book, chiefly keeping an eye out for
what it might mean for us today. But for all it's virtues, all it's
imagination and dazzling virtuosity, the result does rather fall
between stools. 'Naked Lunch' has very little of
the original book to it, and it didn't matter one whit. This
production has either too much or not enough of the book, holding to
it's narrative structure but then bending it to a more contemporary
purpose.
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