Eamon Flack remembers the exact moment he first encountered The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s darkly satirical classic set in Soviet Russia.
It was the winter of 2000, and he was “living a grim existence in Brisbane”, he tells ABC RN’s The Stage Show.
A friend, a musician he’d recently met, gave Flack a copy of the classic novel (which famously inspired the song Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones).
Its effect on Flack, now the artistic director of Belvoir St Theatre, was profound.
“I don’t know why he gave it to me, but I remember … [realising] there’s a whole other life that you can live, there’s a whole other way of thinking, and that ridiculousness may be a source of possibility, rather than of shame,” he says.
One of the great Russian novels of the 20th century, The Master and Margarita has long been considered notoriously difficult to adapt, thanks to its complex plot.
Undeterred by this spiky reputation, Flack has brought The Master and Margarita to the stage for Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, more than two decades after he first fell in love with the book.
A 20th-century masterpiece
Mikhail Bulgakov was a controversial figure in the Russian literary world.
Born in Kyiv in 1891, he trained as a medical doctor and served as an army physician in WWI, before giving up medicine to pursue writing.
While Flack says he was a “dominant force” in Moscow’s literary scene, Bulgakov’s plays, stories and novels were regularly panned by critics and banned by authorities for their perceived anti-revolutionary tone.
He began writing The Master and Margarita in secret in 1928, while enduring a relentless campaign against him by the Communist Party.
“The fact that he could continue to write this incredibly life-ful, vibrant, playful, funny book is astonishing,” says Flack.
“And I think he had to — if he couldn’t keep finding a way to write this book, he would have just died of despair.”
A satire of Stalinist Russia, The Master and Margarita is a novel too complicated to summarise.
Three narrative strands “dance around each other”, says Flack: one in which the devil arrives in Moscow and terrorises the literary scene; one featuring The Master, Bulgakov’s alter-ego; and another recounting the last days of Christ.
Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita at a time of acute political repression under the Stalinist regime.
“So many of his friends were imprisoned, arrested, executed [or] sent into internal exile,” Flack says.
For all his trouble with censorship and hostility from the Soviet press, Bulgakov evaded arrest — perhaps thanks to his popularity with Stalin, who reportedly loved his play The Days of the Turbins, a dramatisation of his 1925 novel The White Guard.
“There was a very famous phone call — Stalin rang Bulgakov one day [in response to the author’s request for permission to leave Russia] — and it’s entirely possible that the only reason that he wasn’t arrested was because of that,” Flack says.
“But I’m sure that if Stalin actually knew about this book, it would have been a different story.”
Due to its incendiary content, the novel remained unpublished until 1973, more than 30 years after his death (in 1940 from a kidney disorder).
“In some ways, you could think of this novel as a kind of act of revenge — it’s like this great playwright who was not allowed to write for the stage wrote this extraordinary impossible work of theatre in the form of a secret novel,” Flack says.
“He died not knowing whether or not the book would ever see the light of day … In many ways, its existence is a miracle.”
A surprise pandemic hit
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Flack brought together a group of suddenly out-of-work actors. “On a hunch, I said, ‘Let’s read this book’, and everyone fell in love with it,” he says.
“It was a book written in a time of despair and horror that was full of life and possibility and joy, and I think that’s what it offered us at that time.”
As they workshopped the text, Flack and his ensemble faced the same challenge faced by countless predecessors: How to adapt this famously complex and ambitious novel for the stage?
They began in the obvious place: page one.
It’s a work designed to be read aloud, Flack says. Bulgakov dictated the novel’s last revisions to his wife — Yelena Shilovskaya, who inspired Margarita — and held a secret, late-night reading of the book that shocked his friends.
“There’s a sense that it was always written to be shared, was always written to be passed around and said out loud, rather than just published and read in private,” Flack says.
“That was our starting point: The idea that this unstageable work of theatrical imagination is probably best begun with the simple act of reading aloud from the book.”
An ‘unwieldy beast’
Josh Price, who plays the feline Behemoth in the Belvoir St production, knows well the challenges and rewards that accompany staging a production of The Master and Margarita.
Price — and his castmate Mark Leonard Winter (The Newsreader, Cleverman), who plays The Master in the Belvoir St show — appeared in “a very loose adaptation” of Bulgakov’s novel in 2014.
“It’s an unwieldy beast, so you can only ever contain so much of it in your mind,” he says.
“Rediscovering it with the ensemble through this process during lockdown and then subsequently through our workshops over the past three years has been an utter delight, rediscovering all the magic within the book.”
Actor Gareth Davies, who plays the demonic Azazello, says it required them to be utterly open, and to “work from a place of not knowing”.
“The good thing about the book is it’s not fluffy, and it’s not frothy. So, despite being explosively imaginative, you also need a tremendous amount of rigour, and I think the whole cast and creative team were really on board [and] were really trying to work this out together.
“We had this big puzzle in front of us, and we’re just all trying to work out how to put that puzzle together and what our specific puzzle shape looks like.”
Reflecting the production’s unorthodox development process, the cast and crew rely on a “devised text” rather than a traditional script.
“It’s been a really different way of working,” Flack says.
“What we began with was a kind of edited thing that collated lots and lots of theatrical ideas that we’d had throughout the workshopping into a proposed structure, and that was always going to have to be realised on the floor rather than rehearsed like a normal play.
“Hopefully, it produces something that has a sort of beauty and energy inside it, which I hope feels like some kind of answer or inoculation or resistance to the weird, difficult, fearful, crushing times that we’re still in, even post-pandemic.”
The Master and Margarita runs from November 11 to December 10 at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre.