Sex, lies and phallic buildings: for a play about architecture, My Master Builder comes with some strangely shaky foundations. Not that you can tell from the poster, with the attention-grabbing face of Ewan McGregor flanked by the no less attractive visages of Elizabeth Debicki and Kate Fleetwood. Proving that stuntcasting is not something exclusive to Jamie Lloyd, this debut outing directed by Michael Grandage and written by Lila Raicek (making her West End debut) brings the problematic Henrik Ibsen play into the twenty-first century.
The Swedish playwright has proved popular in recent times, mostly due to creative interpretations. Matt Smith was the lead in last year’s An Enemy of the People, which was given an immersive flavour by Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer. In the last month alone, London has seen three of Ibsen’s works twisted into a more modern shape, albeit in very different ways. The Kiln’s Shanghai Dolls was a pandemic holdover that transplanted the bones of the story to mid-twentieth-century China, while Ghosts at the Lyric was a more faithful adaptation. My Master Builder — with its slightly changed name and radically changed plot — falls between the two.
That Ibsen’s name isn’t on the poster is a telling sign. That in some ways is a good thing: probably Ibsen’s most autobiographical play, it tells the story of an older man in a failing marriage who comes into contact after a decade with a much younger woman he had once fallen in love with. At the time he wrote it, the 64-year-old writer was having an affair with one teenage admirer while lusting after another, Hildur Andersen (the inspiration for The Master Builder’s Hilda Wangel). Then again, having the usual “inspired by,” “based on” or “after” planted before the title would be a tad disingenuous, considering how little this work owes to the original beyond the basic plot structure and characters.
Elena (Fleetwood) is holding a party for her husband, the renowned “starchitect” Henry Solness (McGregor). They are celebrating the opening of his new building, a memorial built on the site of a burnt-out church. It’s an event, though, with an agenda: in between secretly having her attorney prepare divorce papers, Elena has invited Mathilde (Debicki), a former student of Henry with whom he had a close relationship. Added to the mix are Elena’s PA, Kaja (Mirren Mack), and Henry’s former protégé, Ragnar (David Ajala).
Raicek, whose name is pronounced Ray-sek (someone once told her, “You write racy plays, the way to remember the pronunciation of your name is ‘racy Raicek’”), is a conundrum the London theatre world has been pondering over since the announcement of My Master Builder. Her writing career so far seems to amount to not much more than story credits on a dozen episodes of Gossip Girl and ten for the similar show Younger. Last June, she married Douglas Raicek — who runs the 100-year-old Peerless Clothing, a family business that manufactures clothes for the likes of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger — after a whirlwind romance, and by August was working on a play backed by Sony Music Entertainment’s Seaview Productions. She’s more at home talking to Tatlerand Town & Country than the stage press, and the announcement of this work by a debut writer in a prestigious venue (albeit directed by the assured hands of Grandage) raised more than a few eyebrows.
To her credit, Raicek has taken Ibsen’s badly aged stodge apart and repacked it with many contemporary topics. Take, for example, the attitude to age differences between partners: despite hankering after the younger Ragnar, Elena has no qualms castigating her husband for his infatuation with someone decades younger. Then there’s the imbalance of power between pupil and professor — did Henry abuse his position and take advantage when he fell for Mathilde? Feminism and sisterhood are also in the spotlight: should they be more about protecting women from the attentions of older men or allowing them to make their own choices?
Mathilde is not oblivious to her situation, both when she was at university and now. In the meantime, she has written a spicy novel called Master, a thinly veiled “fiction” about a university romance between tutor and student, and it is immediately apparent when she first meets Henry at the party that she still has a deep yearning for him after all these years. Intimacy co-ordinator Ben Wright has his work cut out for him as the pair set about re-establishing their relationship.
Throughout, Raicek doesn’t come up with any easy answers. Strike that: she doesn’t come up with any answers. Like the TV shows she has worked on, My Master Builder is more interested in layering drama on top of drama and seeing how her sharply drawn characters react. A generous soul would suggest that maybe she intends for the audience to make up their own minds; then again, that generous soul probably hadn’t spent two hours wading through this soapy mess, with unpolished dialogue that awkwardly flits between the classical and the contemporary.
McGregor sails through with all the best lines and the worst acting. He stomps around with the elegance of an angry water buffalo and barks his words out, despite being clearly miked up (presumably to protect his voice and not because, in the 17 years since he last trod the boards, he has lost the ability to project his voice). Debicki, for her part — as tall as she is graceful — has little to do beyond adoring Henry and facing off against Elena. Ajala does superbly with the scraps thrown his way, and Mack is definitely a name to watch. Fleetwood, whether defiantly angry or desperately lusting, chews up the scenery like a chainsaw through toilet paper. Quite why her name isn’t at the top of the poster is something of a mystery.
My Master Builder continues until 7 June, for tickets go to www.wyndhamstheatre.co.uk
For our interview with Clara McGregor go to www.1883magazine.com/clara-mcgregor.
Words by Franco Milazzo
Photography Johan Persson
