American playwright Lila Raicek offers a punchy and poisonous spin on Ibsen’s original play
The dramas of Chekhov and Ibsen are eternally relevant because of the never-ending pertinency of their themes and they are also endlessly adaptable. Last week saw the opening of Conor McPherson’s glistening new play The Brightening Air, which brings a highly Chekhovian set-up to a ramshackle family home in 80s Sligo; now American playwright Lila Raicek offers a punchy and poisonous spin on Ibsen’s 1893 play The Master Builder. In the lead role Ewan McGregor buzzes with charisma as he returns to the London stage after many years’ absence.
We’re not in Ibsen’s Scandinavia anymore, but instead at the lavish Hamptons beach house of a wealthy British couple during a fraught weekend of 4 July celebrations. Henry Solness (McGregor) is an internationally renowned architect – or “star-chitect” – who is about to unveil his latest creation, a remodelling of an old whalers’ church, in memory of his late son.
Unlike in the Ibsen original, the women here have meaty roles and agency, and Henry’s wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood) is thus a big name in publishing. Elena, beautifully played with brittle bitterness by Fleetwood, has all the world weariness of a successful woman for ever overlooked in favour of her even more famous spouse. She is cynical about her husband’s career – according to her, architecture is all “crusty old men w**king on about who’s erected the highest tower” – and we learn straight away that she is filing for divorce. Henry, however, is not privy to this knowledge.
Into this already bubbling cauldron is flung Mathilde (an ethereal Elizabeth Debicki), now a journalist but a decade ago a 20-year-old university student who had an affair with Henry when he was her professor.
Through this plot point Raicek unflinchingly investigates the imbalance of the power dynamic inherent in that age-old cliché of the older professional man and the younger impressionable woman. The fact that Mathilde has now written a novel based upon her liaison with Henry doesn’t add to the smooth running of this glamorous but toxic house party (desirable glossy magazine-style design from Richard Kent), in which Henry’s former protégé Ragnar (David Ajala) and Elena’s assistant Kaia (the ever intriguing Mirren Mack) have problematic secrets of their own.
Michael Grandage’s robustly elegant production guides us confidently through Raicek’s appealingly murky mixture of sex, power and professional status, using Elena to demonstrate how female empowerment and solidarity can curdle when it comes to sexual jealousy.
Henry, a gilded figure, glides through the action semi-obliviously to the emotional currents he leaves swirling in his wake and McGregor exquisitely captures the way that, like too many successful men, Henry is lazy in love.
Everything up to this juncture has come too easily to him and the women in his life have had to suffer the collateral damage. Yet, as in Ibsen, a mighty reckoning awaits.
To 12 July (mymasterbuilderplay.com)
