Master and Margarita

We were off to another play the other day, another one at the Barbican, which is where we saw Cate Blanchett in her really weird German play.  I gotta visit the Barbican more, seeing as how my work is just one block away.  For one they have this art installation there at the moment, which is a room with rain constantly falling (sounds like London really).  What is so cool though is that they have all these motion sensors and so while you walk around you are constantly surrounded by rain, but it never falls on you.  Sounds like my kind of rain.  They are also meant to have a pretty good library, full of travel guides, which means I don't have to buy one next city I visit, I only have to borrow one.  Now that's a good use of a public library.

But anyway this night we were there to see the Master and Margarita, it was an adaptation of the book by Bulgakov.  If you have read the book you might see that it is kind of a hard story to convert to the theatre, there is so much going on, and there's a lot of devilish action, a lot of flashbacks.  It was done by Complicite, which had actually already done a sell-out run of the same show earlier in the year.   When I saw they were doing another showing, I was straight on to the ticketing.  Which meant we ended up with seats 4 rows from the stages.  This actually turned against us, when halfway through it became a bit more like a really scary comedy show where it was almost like you were going to be forced on stage and sell your soul, either that or take off all your clothes and give them to one of the actors.

I was also interested to see how they treated the fact that in the book the Margarita of the title spends about a third of it completely naked.  I was sure they wouldn't really have her completely naked, surely they would have her in a skin suit, or underpants.  But no, completely nude, and I'm talking completely.  And there was quite a lot of action in the second half, so she was running around, jumping on chairs, flying through the air, all in just high heels.  It's very odd watching someone completely naked, whilst everyone else is fully clothed, and sitting in a theatre surrounded by a bunch of high brow types.  They did have some unnecessary naked old man action in the first half to balance out the female nudity in the second half.

Another thing I noticed about this theatre troupe is that they weren't uniformly pretty, in fact very few of them were even what you would call attractive, just everyday people, or really a little strange looking, everyday people.  Which I thought was kind of weird in the acting world, in that it seems that you have to be good looking to get ahead.  So points for that as well.

I think if you do get a chance to see one of Complicite's productions give it a go.  It really sticks with you.  I really liked the book too though, so perhaps that helped.  I don't think you needed to have read it to enjoy the show though, this wasn't a Harry Potter movie.  I would put it up there with Cate Blanchett's Big and Small play.  I think the acting was better with Cate Blanchett (no surprise there), but the ambition of this play was much greater.  And the things they did with video and sound was another notch up.

It's odd to compare the shows I have seen at the Barbican with those I've seen at the National Theatre.  So far at the Barbican we have seen a Japanese rendition of a Shakespeare play, Cate Blanchett, and now this.  Whereas at the National Theatre we have mainly seen Irish plays set in periods where the Irish were going through a bit of a rough time.  I'm not sure who decides the plays they show at the NT, but perhaps they should get out to the Barbican more?