Frank Castorf - Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz

A meeting of stars: exceptional stagecraft and a masterwork of literature! 'Der Meister und Margarita' is Mikhaïl Boelgakov's brilliant political and philosophical satire, which he worked on incessantly for ten years. This many-layered novel was not published until twenty-six years after his death in 1940. In it, Boelgakov employs the devil to get even with Stalin and his repressive regime: The Master is in psychiatry, after the critics have pulverized his novel. He tells about the novel, in which Jesus is confronted with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. Jesus (Jeshua) here is not the missionary prophet, but a secular figure face-to-face with the man of power. For director Frank Castorf, who grew up in East Germany, the history of Stalinism, the life of humiliation and suspicion are part of his youth. His stagecraft is like a house with many rooms, full of autobiographical references and reflections about angst and treachery, lies and truth. Above all, fiction and reality blend into each other, shaped on scene by a constant interchange of acting and video recording, which has gained in scary pertinence since the events of September 11th 2001.