“…give me a surfeit of it, that I may sicken and so die…”. Not music here, but the dazzling son et lumière techniques that Simon McBurney and the Complicité company brought to the Grand Theatre last week with their production of “The Master and Margarita”. Not just sophisticated back projection to set the Moscow atmosphere and where necessary provide an amplifying background to lines about Soviet society, but also miniature cameras here and there allowing odd angle shots of parts of the action to be enlarged and emphasised on the screen.

And not just booming synthesisers and screaming violins, but tricks with miked actors allowing questions in a madman’s brain to reverberate-erate-verberate-erate-erate beyond the typographic scope of the medium here as well as the limit of intelligibility.

I doubt that the trickery and elaborate stagecraft is supposed to dominate the evening as much as it does, at the expense of the work it is based on, Mikhail Bulgakov’s late thirties novel of the same name. The unfortunate truth of the matter however is that it does. Especially since there was so much of it – three-and-a-half hours’ worth. I doubt very much that the whistles and cheers that marked the curtain were due to appreciation of the digs at Soviet use of mental asylums or an understanding of the philosophical dilemmas faced by Pontius Pilate arguing with the philosopher Yeshua.

There were whistles and cheers though, which in the end is primarily what one asks for in the theatre, and they were well deserved by a direction that not only had magical modern tricks up its sleeve, but also excellent command of more old-fashioned skills in manipulating the movements of the cast of fifteen (seemed like more), as they swept across the stage almost like circling starlings to accompany scene changes, and generally used as a corps in ballet or a mute mobile Greek chorus..

The best example to my mind of what is effectively chorus work was the way the running over of one of the characters by a group formed up to represent a tram. On the whole a virtuoso performance.

Buried underneath this there was of course a plot - or rather three intertwined. In Plot A Satan comes to Moscow for no apparent reason with a devilish retinue including (sadly rather a pantomimic) talking cat, and manages to poke condescending fun at Moscow society. In this plot a poet writes a play about Jesus and Pontius Pilate that offends the literary commissars. Satan reappears in Plot B where a novelist, called for some reason the Master, also writes a novel about Pontius Pilate that displeases the official intelligentsia, and while doing so has a deep affair with a woman, Margarita, who does a deal with the devil to rescue her lover from the mental home to which his despair over his novel has driven him. Plot C is the plot of Plot B’s novel, and therefore a plot within a plot….

As in ‘Hamlet’ in the end everybody dies.

If this sounds confusing that’s because it is unless possibly you have read the novel a couple of times. Which may well be worth doing: after all a staged version of ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Crime and Punishment’ probably wouldn’t do any better. In general, if there is ever going to be a successfully staged version of the book, this wasn’t it. But I doubt there will be.

Acting didn’t present a problem except for a tendency to go overly hysterical by some of the characters. There is a slight tendency towards self-parody particularly for whoever played Satan and his crew, who without too much difficulty could have walked straight off of a pantomime stage along with the cat. And Margarita was unconvincing either as the Master’s lover or as Satan’s slave-queen.

You will note there are no actors’ names there. This is because Complicité, wanting to preserve its image (and reality I guess) as an ensemble, merely lists in the programme all the actors in alphabetical order. Reasonable enough, but it also fails, uniquely in my experience, to give a list of characters, which does tend even more to obscure what is going on. With this show, the audience needs all the help it can get, and knowing who you’re supposed to be listening to would give it some.

Contrariwise, the technical crew are all credited: the set (Es Devlin), the lighting (Paul Anderson), the sound (Gareth Fry) and video (Finn Ross) were all splendid. The sound incidentally managed not to be deafening, which in contemporary times is both a rarity and a blessing.

McBurney says this is a ‘work in progress’. It will probably be successful and deserve to be so. However, its main effect will probably turn out to have been the way it got and will get various other directors intellectual juices flowing.