Theatre Journal

After a sold-out premiere at the 2022 Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Jianjun Li’s acclaimed recreation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita toured China in August 2023. Produced by New Youth Theatre Company, the production followed adaptations of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire as the final piece in its post-human trilogy, which, according to Li, “looked into the concept of post-humanism by delving into social problems.” This production centered on human beings enclosed in a highly technological society; every problem that presented itself as a technological one could still be attributed to the problems of human beings themselves. Li’s work on this theme “discussed the questions about the real” and focused on the border between the real and the fake, technology and bodily experience, past and future.

Like Bulgakov’s novel, Li’s production also staged two storylines. In the first storyline, the novelist Master escapes to a psychiatric clinic due to the sharp criticism of his writing. Professor Woland (Satan) appears as a magician to uncover the corruption of the government and society at the same time, and coaxes Margarita, Master’s lover, into finding Master and avenging those who have persecuted him. The second storyline is the story of Master’s novel, in which a Roman Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, executes Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth). By the same token, Li’s production was roughly divided into two stages: downstage, the ensemble performed mainly the stories set inside the psychiatric clinic; and upstage, in a space decorated as a dressing room, they performed mainly the story of Master’s novel as well as Margarita’s recollections of Master. This was also recorded live and projected on a screen hung above the stage. While Bulgakov’s novel gave the themes of politics, religion, and love equal emphasis, and put religion forward as a significant means to maintain balance in a society in which “science” was the only criterion of truth, Li’s adaptation instead focused much more clearly on the socio-political. [End Page 364]

Taking socio-political criticism as its theme, Li’s The Master and Margarita first explored the border between the real and the fake. In his novel, Bulgakov spends dozens of pages depicting how Woland teased the vested interests in Moscow with his religious power. Li cut most of this but asked his actors to dress as lower-class people and repeatedly cry out desperate questions, like “Is it real or fake?” and “Is it magic or the real after the magic is revealed?” Those so-called psychopaths, who were in fact far from insane, were disciplined to be robot-like fanatics who wore red scarves, waved red flowers, and praised the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Their exaggerated performance revealed that they could not see the real outside the clinic, but stubbornly believed that Moscow had a bright future. The political propaganda of a totalitarian nation filled the minds of those who had seen the real with the fake.

Li asked the same actor (Zhang Jiahuai) to portray both Master and Yeshua, in order to extend this examination of the distinctions between the real and the fake. Zhang walked from the big screen to the front stage, transforming from Master to Yeshua, which paralleled Li’s goal of utilizing technology to endow the real/fake binary with a post-human sense. Li turned to live video to stage the embedded narrative of Master’s novel. When Yeshua talked with Pilate through the screen, it separated them into two spaces even though the actor portraying Pilate was just ten meters away from the actor portraying Yeshua. The...