Again, insiders say that Davies, a seasoned former journalist, is not a man who would aggressively press for “the legal denial route” in handling the media.The identities of those responsible for the denial, and their precise roles, should become clear today when the inquiry report, compiled by Peter Norbury, a Manchester-based solicitor with the leading City firm Eversheds, is formally handed to the Board.It is not known whether the report will implicate Geoff Thompson, the FA’s chairman, or Palios, in that particular chain of events. “If only they would all learn to acknowledge shadows,” sighs Woland, bewailing a regime that would “flay the surface of the earth to enjoy a fantasy of bare light”.Though it was suffering a little from second-night tiredness syndrome the evening I saw it, Pimlott’s highly inventive production clearly has the measure of the work’s mighty imaginative compass and its roller-coaster shifts of tone “Cowardice is the only sin,” declares the Master By that token, the Festival Theatre is currently sinless To 24 September (01243 781312). You wouldn’t want to be caught dead at one of his parties, like the wackily staged Walpurgisnacht Ball for the revived stiffs of (among others) Jack the Ripper and Caligula. But his devilish pact with the heroine Margarita (a wonderfully ardent Clare Holman) succeeds in turning her into a sexy witch who has the power to demand reunion with the Master. I think people will find when they finally exit the theatre that rather than feeling drained, their intellect has been charged up, their emotions stirred.”Edinburgh International Festival (0131-473 2000; ), 15 August to 5 September THE PICK OF THIS YEAR’S FRINGEWhen Guy Masterton – the brains behind last year’s Edinburgh hit Twelve Angry Men, featuring stand-up comedians – decided to revive Ken Kesey’sOne Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he little guessed the lunatics would take over not only the asylum but also the production He stepped down during rehearsals “for personal reasons”. The epigraph to Bulgakov’s book comes from the moment in Goethe’s Faust when the hero asks Mephistopheles “What art thou?” and receives the reply, “Part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”This is the paradoxical outcome of Woland’s manoeuvres.

With his retinue of a huge talking cat and assorted oddballs, this sinister joker has a violently disruptive effect on Moscow. One theatre apparatchik is decapitated, another is instantaneously exiled to Yalta (he’s played in a drolly self-mocking touch by Martin Duncan, one of Chichester’s artistic directors); blood is spilt and bank notes cascade from the ceiling at a conjuring show.Yet Woland’s pranks are also therapeutic in the way that they riotously debunk the smug Soviet debunkers who claimed that there was nothing beyond the material. You could argue that the jesting, carnivalesque side of Bulgakov is better reflected in Michael Feast’s camp, glintingly diabolical Woland. Edward Kemp’s astute adaptation makes all the right adjustments. Converting the eponymous hero from a novelist to a playwright allows us to see rehearsed excerpts from his banned work, a dramatic confrontation between Pontius Pilate and a dissident Christ figure who believes that “all authority is a form of violence against people”.

These adroitly negotiated transitions between play and outer world highlight how trickily art and life mirror each other in their anxious preoccupation with artistic censorship (“manuscripts don’t burn”), state power and cre-ative compromise.But the depressed and unselfconfident Master (the excellent Sam West) is only a partial portrait of the author. In the old unlamented days, you’d have been about as likely to see Theatre de Complicite tackling a William Douglas-Home comedy as witness the Chichester Festival Theatre mounting a main stage adaptation of a long, dauntingly rich proto-magical realist novel by a subversive Russian, replete with a cast of 20-plus, an on-stage band playing specially composed music and a magic adviser.
That, though, is what is on offer in a production by Steven Pimlott that tempts you to do the unthinkable: put the words “Chichester” and “cutting-edge” in the same sentence.Written in secret between 1928 and his death in 1940, Bulgakov’s book is at once a love-story, a Faustian tragicomedy and an exuberantly savage satire on die-hard Soviet materialism. The devil makes an unscheduled visit to Stalinist Moscow as an expert in black magic in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita Here’s an even odder thing. Ecstasy, excess, temazepam and T’Pau collide in a Taking Charlie, a new play with songs by the writer of Beautiful Thing and Gimme Gimme Gimme!, Jonathan Harvey.Assembly Rooms (0131-226 2428) to 30 Aug. Steven Berkoff returns with his controversial poem to the victims of September 11, Requiem for Ground Zero (17-22 Aug) and Poe’s terrifying The Tell Tale Heart (24-29 Aug).