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11 February 2016

The difficulty of staging Ibsen in a post-Yewtree world

The Master Builder at The Old Vic is even stranger than the original - especially when it tries to negotiate modern sensibilities.

By Mark Lawson

Sometimes a cigar, warns a joke dubiously attributed to Sigmund Freud, is just a cigar. And, in other circumstances, a huge church tower that a seductive young woman persuades an ageing man to climb is just a huge church tower. Not, however, in Henrik ­Ibsen’s play The Master Builder, written in 1892, when the Norwegian playwright was 64 and besotted with a younger admirer, and Freud had just begun his revolutionary consultations in Vienna.

That the protagonist, Halvard Solness – an architect who is struggling to get anything up these days – was proto-Freudian when written, but feels satirically psychoanalytical now, is one of two big problems with the play. The other is its tonal instability.

Ibsen dramas broadly divide between the ones with symbolism and trolls (Brand, Peer Gynt) and theatre-redefining exercises in social and psychological realism (A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler). However, there are a few works – including The Master Builder and Little Eyolf, recently finely revived at the Almeida by Richard Eyre – in which naturalism blurs into supernaturalism.

So, just as Little Eyolf’s searingly believable examination of the impact of grief on a marriage also involves a batty rat-catcher who may have caused a child’s death through enchantment, The Master Builder does not so much change horses in mid-race as jump from horseback to unicorn. It starts off as a study of male power in crisis, with Solness a strutting but now stuttering brother to other Ibsen menopausal males, such as Dr Thomas Stockmann in An Enemy of the People and the title character of the disgraced financier in John Gabriel Borkman. Like them, Master Builder Solness is an egotist under threat both professionally (he no longer has much energy for his work but doesn’t want younger colleagues to have the jobs, either) and personally. He taunts his wife by flirting with a female assistant, although there is a suggestion – which David Hare’s nicely contemporary-conversational adaptation firms up with the word “impotent” – that the couple’s sex life died when their children were killed in a fire.

Last year at the National Theatre, Ralph Fiennes moved suddenly to the front rank of British stage actors by bringing extraordinary clarity to the windbag Jack Tanner in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and his Solness is again magnetically precise: you hear each word, feel every thought. He shows a man who keeps reaching for previously known feelings of power – artistic, erotic, domestic – but finds, like the driver of a failing sports car, that the push isn’t quite there. Fiennes transmits the character’s terror at no longer being terrifying.

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But then Ibsen goes troll on us. Towards the end of the first act, a young woman called Hilde Wangel turns up, claiming to be keeping a rendezvous arranged with Solness a decade previously, when he “bent her backwards” and kissed her “many times”, calling her his “princess”. As Hilde would have been 13 then, this scene is almost too realistic for post-Yewtree theatre, and details such as Hilde’s reference to her bag of dirty knickers that urgently need washing (that isn’t Hare being daring; it’s there in the earliest English translations) would have had Freud rushing to the theatre.

Hans Christian Andersen would have been close behind, however, because Hilde also talks of “trolls” and “castles in the air”,  and both she and Solness seem to take seriously the possibility that he may have imagined her or summoned her up. Actors can’t be asked to play a character of ambiguous existence; even a ghost can only be acted substantially. So the young Australian actress Sarah Snook makes Hilde very real and very now – she could have walked in off the backpack gap-year trail – and the director, Matthew Warchus, gives her a moment of great theatrical power, curving urgently through the air as she stands on a swing to see Solness attempt to conquer his fear of heights.

Yet Snook’s naturalistic vigour makes the play even stranger than it already was. If Hilde is a completely unambiguous figure, then either Solness is a paedophile predator, or she is a malicious, marriage-wrecking fantasist – both problematic situations for modern theatregoers. As a result, we are never quite sure what we are watching, although always happy to be seeing Fiennes in his prime.

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This article appears in the 10 Feb 2016 issue of the New Statesman, The legacy of Europe's worst battle

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