Bulgakov spent the last twelve years of his life on a novel he knew he would never see in print. The Master and Margarita appeared more than a quarter of a century after his death, and it still reads like a dispatch from a city where fear has become the weather: Moscow in the nineteen-thirties, where people inform on one another, rehearse their loyalty and deny whatever cannot be explained. Then the devil arrives. He needs no miracles; it is enough to let people be themselves.

Around the satire Bulgakov sets two other stories — Pontius Pilate, who condemns an innocent man because he is afraid, and the Master and Margarita, a writer broken by the rejection of his book and the woman who will strike any bargain to save him. Cowardice, the novel insists, is the worst of vices; love and the written word are what no age can confiscate. Manuscripts don’t burn. For Maxim Didenko this is a third production at Nationaltheater Mannheim, after Through the Eyes of a Clown and The Night in Lisbon, told, like all his work, through drama, music, movement and video.