The large-format Rigola returns to the Teatre Lliure: "I haven't slept in two weeks."

BarcelonaIt had been eight years since Àlex Rigola had set foot in the main hall of the Teatre Lliure, since that Ivanov 2017, with which he announced that he had become a "stage diabetic" and wanted to bury his theatrical stamp and disappear behind the actors. After years locked in a wooden box and in a fifty-seat room (his theater, the Heartbreak Hotel), finally Rigola returns to do theatre for five hundred people with a resounding title, The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail A. Bulgakov (1891-1949), which will be at the Montjuïc Theatre from September 18 to October 19. "Here we had to put on a show. The entire work is crazy. And the stage bet is for everything to be crazy," he warns.

Returning to the Lliure has been for him like "going back to eat at your parents' house on Sunday: it's warm, it's beautiful, it's nostalgic, and you do it with gusto, especially when you don't go every day," he admits. Because he also confesses that he no longer feels comfortable in the format that made him a famous director: "My natural space is a small space. I need simpler things. I don't put sauces on my meals anymore, and a large room needs a large kitchen team to work. My body only tolerates it occasionally," he says. "I've been up without sleep for two weeks, waking up every hour and a half; it can't be good. And that's even if everything's going well! I think the project is a success and that we've succeeded. It's been passionate and fun, but my body doesn't want to put its energy into this; instead, it needs to say a lot of things," she says.

What he was interested in explaining here has to do with "narrative and manipulation." "Who has the power of the narrative? Does truth have meaning? Should truth be above finality?" asks Rigola, who says he likes to criticize and challenge himself: "I like characters who have a crisis-ridden relationship with their own ethics," he concludes. That's why he proposed to Lliure a classic "much loved by Russians, more than Dostoyevsky," a satire that speaks of cultural structures, artistic censorship, and the suffocation of the established social order, of a single way of thinking. Bulgakov exposes his experience as an author punished by the regime through the Master, who has a relationship of dependence on power in order to publish his work. In fact, the text, written between 1928 and 1940 and completed by his widow, Elena Sergeevna (in the novel, Margarita), was not published in Moscow without censorship until 1973. "Bulgakov was unable to work for a time and wrote to Stalin: 'Expel'" Rigola.

From Moscow to Jerusalem

An elongated, rotating stage, with the audience on both sides, will be both 1930s Moscow where the devil and his entourage appear, and 19 centuries earlier Jerusalem where Pontius Pilate accepts the Jews' decision to crucify Jesus. "It's impossible not to see parallels with the world today, in relation to Palestine, or to cultural structures that are not precisely in Russia...", says the director.

Rigola has spent nine months adapting the novel, based on Xènia Dyakonova's translation published by Proa. "I am very lucky that people don't read, so I can take exciting stories that people haven't read and bring them to the stage with the confidence that it is a proven classic," says the director. It will be performed with fourteen actors, starting with Francesc Garrido, Nao Albet and Laia Manzanares in the roles of the devil, Mestre and Margarita, and escorted by Nil Cardoner, Biel Duran, Miranda Gas, Carlota Olcina, Jordi Rico and Sandra Monclús, among others, most of them playing more than one character. The microphones return to the stage, along with the deafening music, the movement, and the Rigolian stage device that marked an entire generation, but with the gaze of a mature artist, 55 years old: "Things are not one color, they are not black or white, but above all they are not white: the world and life are made up of opposites, they have multiple faces."