Meister und Margarita

In the organizer's words:

At least believe in the devil!

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 shape of a giant cat - he is causing a real stir 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 forbidden 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. In his powerlessness, a writer in isolation imagines a powerful devil who makes the conditions of an autocratic system dance. When "Master and Margarita" was published posthumously in 1966, the novel became a cult: many learned it by heart, the censored passages circulated underground.

"Master and Margarita", this real-life fantasy novel, is a labyrinth that is difficult to find your way into but hard to find your way out of, it is intoxicating and anarchic, dark and funny, poignant, confusing and enlightening. He names cowardice as the greatest of all sins in the world.

Jette Steckel, who most recently brought "Mephisto" to the Kammerspiele stage after "The Fatherless" (both invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen), is once again staging a great political play with "Master and Margarita".

"Of course, man is mortal, but that would be half as bad. The bad thing is that he is suddenly mortal. That's the crux of the matter! Man can't even say what he's going to do that evening."

- from "Master and Margarita"