You dream the impossible dream watching Complicité’s stage version of Mikhail Bulgakov’s amazing phantasmagorical novel: director Simon McBurney achieves a remarkable consistency in the various strands and provides a rich feast of dark arts, movement, rhetoric and stunning visual imagery.

The novel, which took twelve years to write, in secret, and which remained unpublished until 1966 (Bulgakov died in 1940, having added his last revisions), is an exhilarating reading experience: it prospers as magic realism, a satire on Soviet tyranny and censorship, and as a wild, unlikely love story, precisely because it is unrestrained and completely absurd and gloriously surreal.

Pinning it down in the theatre should be as sensible a task as putting handcuffs on flowers. But McBurney and his company of sixteen actors play a masterstroke in making the satanic visitor to Stalin’s Moscow, Professor Woland, the tall and scary alter ego of the writer himself, the imprisoned Master.

This provides both narrative cohesion and a handy metaphor of a writer trapped in his own worst nightmare. Using the adaptation Edward Kemp provided for the late Steven Pimlott’s Chichester Festival Theatre production in 2004, McBurney - with designer Es Devlin and video artist Finn Ross - clarifies, rather than obscures, the story in a tumult of physical and cinematic detail.

The Master’s work, a philosophical recreation of Pontius Pilate’s treatment of Yeshua (Jesus) in Jerusalem, restricted to four ambiguous chapters in the novel, cuts across the action like a knife, Tim McMullan giving a wonderful portrait of sweating authority that expands into the wider political framework of the modern crackdown.[WOS_QU@TE]#this visceral, heart-thumping show marks a return to top form#[/WOS_QU@TE]

Then we see the writer Berlioz steam-rollered by a human tram in Patriarch’s Ponds (a square not unlike Russell Square, we are told) and his skull split in the form of a cabbage. Paul Rhys as a sinister Woland is unravelled as the imprisoned Master, and the society of bogus literati are transformed into a theatre audience for the music hall scam.

Retaining the formal balance of Bulgakov, but intensifying his theatricality, McBurney trumps the satirical tone of civic and artistic repression with the power of redemptive love: smoky-voiced Sinéad Matthews gives brave and utterly naked expression to Margarita’s flying intervention, swooping through fields of imagery at the satanic ball and the magically disintegrating city of Jerusalem/Moscow.

Woland’s retinue includes the talking cat, Behemoth, a human-scale black puppet moggy with fiery red eyes voiced by Tamzin Griffin and Amanda Hadingue, as well as Angus Wright’s ingratiating Koroviev and Ajay Naidu’s colourful yes-man Azazello.

It’s a mark of the production, in fact, how vivid and incisive the characterisations are within the ensemble, and there’s an eloquent crucifixion image of Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Cesar Sarachu) seemingly trapped in his own crown of thorns.

Complicité have been brilliant, but perhaps over-cerebral, of late: this visceral, heart-thumping show marks a return to top form as they approach a thirtieth anniversary and embark, in May, on a tour of European festivals leading to the great courtyard of the Popes’ Palace in Avignon in July.

- by Michael Coveney