Writer and Director: Valeriya Pushkareva
Anyone unfamiliar with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita may be a little baffled by the stylistic approach that Valeriya Pushkareva takes in this 70-minute solo adaptation performed at the Etcetera Theatre. While this is an ambitious project that centres Margarita in the story, applies a variety of techniques to bring this complex, fantastical novel to life and certainly captures Pushkareva’s clear passion for this classic work, some of the creative decisions and a lack of distinction between the characters make it hard to access the basic story or this particular format choice.
Margarita is the devoted lover of a man known only as the Master (not the Dr Who kind) who has penned a novel about Pontius Pilate. Certain it will be a hit, the reviews are crippling, and the Master disappears, sending Margarita on a quest to find him, taking her into the depths of hell itself, where she must accompany Satan to a ball he is hosting. As a reward, he offers to grant her a single wish.
Pushkareva adapts only the second part of Bulgakov’s novel, focusing on Margarita’s story and makes some challenging conceptual choices that make representing the large cast and the central character’s fantastical journey much harder. With one-person adaptations, there are two main choices: either to act out all of the characters, leaping about the stage to embody lots of separate people in conversation, or to present a single point of view from which other characters and voices emerge within that perspective. Pushkareva chooses the former to preserve the original text but struggles to make each activity distinctive.
Without knowing the story and characters in advance, it is quite hard to follow without the authorial voice guiding the viewer through the changes of location, of Margarita’s altered physical and mental state, as well as identifying each of the separate characters. Pushkareva tries this through costume changes and some gestures, but the substance is hard to grasp, and the technique inconsistently applied. The Master is played as an uncredited, pre-recorded American voice, as is one of the sub-creations in the hell scene, while Pushkareva plays everyone else herself, and there’s no obvious distinction in that between human and fanciful characters, so it is not clear why some take a bodily form while the Master is a chair and a slightly emotionless soundtrack.
Pushkareva is an engaging performer and enjoys the chameleonic aspects of drama, adopting voices, cat masks, and half glasses to switch between personalities, but the occasional mix of video, music and dance could push Margarita’s Crown of Shadows further into abstract performance art. In fact, more dance and less dialogue might be a better translation of the novel. As this piece develops, whether Pushkareva wants to just tell the story, explore the nature of mortality, of blinded love or to reconsider Margarita’s growing agency over her life, deciding what it is for will help to shape the constructive methods that the writer can apply and how to bring the audience along as well.
Runs until 25 January 2026
