THEATRE DE COMPLICITE'S 'THE MASTER AND MARGARITA'

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.

CINECITY 4: THE QUAY BROTHERS – QUITE DEFINITELY THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Yes, I am not exactly being timely here, finishing my posts on a festival which actually ended two weeks ago. However, I am due extra nerd points for posting this on Christmas Day!

One of the most exciting things for me about this years’ Cine-City festival was the programme dedicated to the Quay Brothers, whose work I’d only ever caught snatches of before. Here we had three showings of shorts, one full-length film (Institute Benjamenta), a Q&A session plus an exhibition! Though Americans living in London, the Brothers are celebrated for their films and animations in the fantastical East European style of Svankmayer and Borowczyk. (NB All direct quotes below are from the programme notes or this interview –a site which looks worth bookmarking in it’s own right.)

They comment “we want to make a world that is seen through a dirty pane of glass. You can’t exactly get at it because it is elusive.” What’s crucial to their work is the distance between a puzzle and a mystery. With a puzzle, the pleasure lies in the working out – the cutting through the convolutions to arrive at a solution. With a mystery the pleasure lies in the precise opposite, embracing the inscrutability, tasting the strangenes. To clear away that pane of glass would be a violation, not a clarification. However, giving the game away on these compelling films is not our biggest worry here! What follows is instead a few hasty scrawls upon that dirty pane.

As with Svankmayer, what’s vital to their aesthetic is the fetishification of everyday objects. Screws, combs, pencil tips, all the little things which lie almost beneath our vision are suddenly rendered animate. This gives rise, to drop a Freudian term, to the all-important sense of the unheimliche, or strange familiarity. As they put it, “what we’re trying to do is release the strangeness.” We peer into this other-world, but it is not grandiloquent and distant - for sheer freakishness is unengaging. We peer into it with the vertiginous sense that we could topple into it at any time. (As much as I will venture any ‘explanation’ for anything here, I’ll suggest the primary puppet in Street of Crocodiles somehow represents the man who starts the machine up.)

Perhaps paradoxically, this sense is enhanced by the Brothers’ refusal to play up the dramatic illusion. Street Of Crocodiles starts with an old man looking into a peep-show, effectively reminding us of our status as audience. Similarly the Optical Boxes in the exhibition often contain viewing slots, or distorting lenses which enlarge the insides once looked through. In the catalogue they speak of the importance of seeing their work on a large screen, where puppets are no longer smaller than us but suddenly blown up to giant-size.

This “extraordinary power of the camera to ‘make strange’ “ is central to their fetishism, but of course they are merely magnifying something cinema does already. Hitchcock, for example, is full off innocuous objects fixated upon by the camera and plot. Even a film as apparantly at variance to the Quays as Bicycle Thieves does this. At one point we see the bicycle large upon the kitchen table, attended to by the son. Later we see it ridden off stolen, growing tinier and tinier against a teeming Rome.

Unfortunately, some of their later shorts abandon animation for pixellation, rusty screws for computerisation. The Comb, for example, loses some of this object-fetishism by creating an all-too-obviously virtual world. It was vital that their animations looked unreal but hand-crafted, with even the credits often hand-written or even carved. Alas, in their Q&A the Brothers explained that this change was not a creative choice but a financial necessity, a response to the more difficult funding situation we now live in. Perhaps their more live-action films such as Benjamenta provide the best hope for them now.

The Brothers also spoke of the importance of music to their work, sometimes even commissioning scores first and working their animation around them. “We much prefer to obey musical laws because they’re not logical,” they explained. You can’t print logic on music, it’s outside of that.” Without having read Schulz’s Street Of Crocodiles, I assume their animation is ‘based’ upon the book the way a musical piece would – elaborating on themes and moods, with scant interest in reproducing the string of events. After watching it I found sequences and images were set to loop in my memory, just as if they were snatches of music.

It’s notable that even when their work isn’t specifically based upon novels or operas, their references tend to be to other artists – composers, authors, even other animators. After all their whole approach stems from accidentally coming across an exhibition of Polish film posters while still students. This can often be a bad sign, creating work which (even when not merely imitative) is is nothing but referential – at it’s worst even post-modern. But perhaps the Quays bend this hermetic quality to work for them. Their references become like their peep-shows and cabinets, creating spaces of strangeness to fall into and get lost. The clusters of allusions almost knot, adding to their works’ sense of ponderousness and claustrophobia.

However, I did at times experience a niggling doubt – that the Quays could pull off this style superbly, but not themselves inhabit it with anything. Are they reliant on outside sources for their substance? Or are they even a superior cousin to those award-winning rock videos, the ones which recycle the tropes of art cinema but never any more? (The Quays made rock videos, for His Name Is Alive, but not in a dumbed-down fashion and anyway that alone should not be considered damning proof.) The question is difficult to answer because you’re not looking for anything discernable in terms of content, more an idiosyncratic spirit. However, it’s most likely to reveal itself in their full-length films, where style alone won’t maintain interest over the duration. I suspect if I could see more of their films, or even these films again, this doubt would either grow or be dispelled.

Watching the films, you can’t but wonder how they are able to realize these works of strange familiarity. Perhaps part of the answer is the fact that they’re identical twins. Their working methods are clearly as interchangeable as their conversation, casually using phrases like “we were reading” or even “our left hand.” The interview transcript I linked to above merely quotes them together, and they even sign their correspondence with a single ‘Q’. They emphasised both their intuitive methods of working (storyboarding to satisfy the backers, then throwing the boards away) and the pitfalls of working with an ensemble to which everything must be explained. (“You just have to sense it, you don't have to think it too much.”)

Perhaps as identical twins they developed a kind of conjoined psyche – sharing their perceptions from the very beginning, in a way siblings born even a short distance apart never would. It’s scarcely innovative to see something child-like in their enclosed worlds of object-fetishism; to children, all objects are infused with character and life. It’s even possible to argue that it’s the very development of communicative skills which banishes such perceptions; as soon as you able to speak of it, you lose your sense of what was so sublime. But for these twins the unspoken remained preserved and, not through words but the manipulation of space and objects, they have effected a means to transmit it to the rest of us. (Disclaimer: As an only child, I am the very opposite of the Quays in this respect.)

"TOLD BUT THESE FEW WORDS": JOHN WESLEY HARDING (TOP 50 ALBUMS)

Bob Dylan, 1967

Despite being another reprint from Ye Olde Print Days, this is also part of an occasional series where I eulogize some of my favourite albums. (Or, for younger readers, CDs.) Content may therefore be more celebratory and less analytical than usual. Despite this being the first entry labelled as such, I really started the series here without knowing it.

I‘m currently in the habit of borrowing my flatmate’s CDs to take into work. Thing is, I can only ever fit one in my jacket pocket. Marooned for a day with a single CD, I’ve learnt the wisdom of choosing wisely. But this is an album I’ve always liked which I haven’t heard in a while, so I should be okay.

As it turns out, listening to it again serves to confirm my view that the highpoint of Dylan’s career is either this or Basement Tapes. (Though admittedly you do have to mentally edit out the lesser Band tracks from Basement Tapes.) This was a realization that came over me slowly. I spent many angry teenage years playing the electrified hallucinogenic grotesquery of Highway 61 Revisited as loud as the volume dial would let me, until my Dad would rush in and accuse me of damaging my hearing. Admittedly, the more subdued sound on display here doesn’t generate that instantaneous antagonistic reaction in Dads, but that just obscures its true worth.

I wonder if the switch had a strange disconcerting effect on the rock audience, who had assumed Dylan was now their mascot after plugging in and turning off his original folk followers. The songs from those albums have been the subject of many a rocked-up cover, from Hendrix’s almost instantaneous cover of Watchtower to Patti Smith’s more recent Wicked Messenger - like they wanted to drown out and extinguish the unamped originals.

Though Highway 61 may have marked a step away from the literalism of the original protest songs, this era makes for even more of a sideways leap – into the allusive land of parable. Much of the appeal lies in the way the songs take place inside some mythic past, what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America”. After the frenetic modernity of Highway 61, John Wesley follows more leisurely trails. Telephones that don’t ring become telegraphs and steamboat whistles, passports become messengers and horsebacked strangers, cars become churches and Napoleon in Rags transforms into St. Augustine.

Alongside the old, weird West we also have the old, weird Victorian England and no shortage of the old, weird Bible either. John Wesley Harding, Tom Paine and St. Augustine all inhabit the same imaginary neighbourhood. Befitting Dylan’s new quietism, all this is assumed rather than paraded, there’s no “long-time-ago-in-galaxy-far-away” style bookends.

(Though of course Dylan’s just foregrounding tendencies he had earlier. Back in ’65 he was already enthusing how folk music was “just based on myth and the Bible and plague and famine and nothing but mystery. Roses growing right up out of people’s hearts and seven years of this and eight years of that and it’s all something that nobody can really touch”.)

The music’s similarly unassuming, a pick-up band of Nashville session men just clock in and do their job. His voice itself is almost unrecognizable from the nasally whine set to wind up Dads, instead it’s deep, gruff and gospelly. He sings distrustingly of the Wicked Messenger “whose mind it multiplied the smallest matter”.

His language is effective through being unassuming, a line like “all across the telegraph his name it did resound” resounds more for its apparent lack of effort. Such simple, direct language is more redolent of folksong than the bogus “these” and “yees” that make most such attempts sound like a bad issue of the Mighty Thor. Writing is about building up a picture gradually through accumulating small and seemingly innocuous words, not painting broad and grandiose flourishes that just flake off in the memory.

But what really makes the album linger in the mind is its beguiling quality. Underneath the simple surface lie pithy parables you never quite get to the bottom of; “nothing was revealed” as he deadpans at the end of Frankie Lee. I was surprised to see so many of these allusion-stuffed songs clocking in on the CD display at under the three-minute mark. Dylan apparently complained at the time that simple was harder to write, but the extra effort was worth it.

There’s a distinction between the gospelly first-person songs which mostly inhabit the second side, which seem to feed from Basement Tapes, and the symbolist character encounters which open and eventually dominate the album. The two final tracks stand out by being as simple and direct as they appear. After the “too much confusion” of all the cryptic allusions, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight is a song about being your baby tonight. These songs offer the “way out of here” longed for on Watchtower, a redemptive coda to send us home happy and satisfied. But ahead lay Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait where, extended to album length they wouldn’t maintain interest. Dylan dipped and, while he rose again eventually, he’d never recapture what he manages so effortlessly here.

Postscript: When first writing this piece I seem to have somehow overlooked Blonde On Blonde entirely. Not sure why, as between them those four albums are surely Dylan’s most essential.