After the debut in Solomeo in September, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA by Michail Bulgakov, is going ot be staged again in Umbria with two performances, in Spoleto at the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti, on Friday, December 21 at 21 and in Todi, at the Teatro Comunale, on Tuesday, January 15 at 21.
The show, produced by the Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria with Brunello Cucinelli spa special contribution, is touring the major Italian theaters, achieving extraordinary success, both by the audience, enthusiastically attending to each replica, and by critics.
The direction is entrusted to Andrea Baracco; actors are Michele Riondino as Woland, Francesco Bonomo (Master/Pontius Pilate), Federica Rosellini (Margarita) and Giordano Agrusta (Behemoth), Carolina Balucani (Hella / Praskov’ja / Frida), Caterina Fiocchetti (Smoking Woman / Natasha), Michele Nani (MarkThe Ratslayer / Varenucha), Alessandro Pezzali (Korov’ev), Francesco Bolo Rossini (Berlioz / Lichodeev / Matthew Levi), Diego Sepe (Caifa / Stravinskij / Rimskij), Oskar Winiarski (Ivan / Jeshua).
“Trying to give life to the magical and perturbing pages of Michail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is perhaps one of the most exciting things that can happen to those involved in theatre. – says Andrea Baracco – The Master and Margarita is a novel full of powerful and absolute colors, all feverishly lit, almost hallucinating. It is a perturbing novel, as complex and articulated as Harlequin’s costume, in which numerous narrative lines intertwine, and within which an infinite number of characters come to life (about 146), which constitute a sort of panorama of the human and the superhuman. From the devil, in the seductive and worldly figure of Woland, a sort of ferocious clown who directs a demonic saraband, to characters who refer to the grotesque universe of one of Bulgakov’s masters, Nikolaj Gogol.
In this novel, one passes from the comic register to the tragic pull, from the most driven variety to the questioning of what is the nature of man and love. Low and high coexist constantly creating an almost acrobatic game, pyrotechnic, in which you always move on the threshold of the impossible, grotesque, misery and sublime. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry, often you laugh and cry at the same time. In short, in this novel, you live, always.
The Master (a character who has more than one resemblance to Bulgakov himself) and Margarita (by many recognized as the author’s wife, Elena Sergeevna), are fatally entangled, almost imprisoned, one in the body and mind of the other, more in the mind than in the body, perhaps. To describe the beginning of their love, the Master pronounces one of the memorable sentences of the novel: love leapt before us from nowhere, like a murderer in an alley, and struck us both, at the same time.
Bulgakov places real time bombs inside the jerseys of his writing, and then suddenly lets them explode, showing us what happens when an extremely severe and ordered structure goes into contradiction, and can no longer, ever again, hide behind the sole reason: “What would be your good, if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if the shadows disappeared, because it is the objects and men that give shadow. Would you like to flay the whole globe, taking away all the trees, and all that is alive, just for your fantasy of enjoying the naked light? You are stupid,” says Woland/Satan to an emissary of Jesus.
You can book by phone, at Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria call center 075/57542222, every weekday, from 16 to 20. Tickets must be collected half an hour before the show, otherwise they will be put back on sale.
Tickets can also be purchased online on the Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria website: www.teatrostabile.umbria.it
