Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which premiered in London in 1893 to a bad press, is not the easiest of his plays; but the leading role has attracted actors of the calibre of Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier, John Wood, Alan Bates, Patrick Stewart and Ralph Fiennes over the years.
The play is open to many psychological interpretations and can easily be read as an allegory of Ibsen’s life. He was 61-years-old when he fell in love with 18-year-old Emilie Bardach and the play is clearly a very loud cry of anguish against Youth beating at the door of his own declining creativity as a playwright.
Ewan McGregor returns to the London stage, after a 17-year-absence, to play Solness, the master builder. But, and it’s a big but, we are not seeing Ibsen’s Solness. Ibsen gets no credit in the programme.
Lila Raicek’s My Master Builder is not a version. It’s not an adaptation. It’s not a translation. It’s a new play. It feels, says Michael Grandage, the director, more like a conversation with the original.
Raicek explores the contradictions of love and the interplay between desire and betrayal through a modern female lens. A marriage is in crisis and the battle for self-preservation leads to self-destruction.
Grandage had directed McGregor as Sky Masterton in Guys and Dolls and Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, roles which were much more suitable for his talent.
McGregor seems quite at a loss as how to play Raicek’s Solness. He is never convincing. The master builder’s wife, played by Kate Fleetwood, becomes the leading role. McGregor is also playing a supporting role to Elizabeth Debicki who is cast as the woman he had loved when she was a teenager. Richard Kent designs beautiful ballroom gowns for the two actresses.
I sat in the theatre, wishing all the while that I was seeing the play Ibsen wrote and wondering why Grandage had not revived it instead of Raicek’s grossly inferior work.
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