When a big star appears in a conspicuously undercooked show, what rankles is the apparent cynicism — the conceited presumption that the sheer aura of an individual talent will compensate for any shortcomings. That concern rears its head once again in a new take on Henrik Ibsen’s “The Master Builder” which opened on Tuesday in London, featuring the Scottish A-lister Ewan McGregor in the title role. In this instance, it’s apt: Artistic hubris is a central theme of Ibsen’s 1892 play, in which an aging architect, worried that his powers are waning, loses his head over an infatuated young woman.
This version, called “My Master Builder,” is written by the New York-based playwright Lila Raicek and directed by Michael Grandage; it runs at Wyndham’s Theater through July 12. Raicek’s interpretation sets out to center Ibsen’s female characters, retelling the story through the lens of #MeToo — but it ends up reducing a complex play to a tawdry marital melodrama.
We’re in the Hamptons, in an elegant dining room backing on to a seaside landscape, with crickets chirruping throughout. (The set is by Richard Kent.) McGregor plays Solness, a celebrated “starchitect” whose moribund marriage to the publisher Elena (Kate Fleetwood, cracklingly erratic) is set to implode as they prepare to host a party celebrating his latest opus: A dazzlingly futuristic church, built in memory of their only son, who died in an accident many years ago.
Among the guests is Mathilde (Elizabeth Debicki, ambiguously winsome), with whom Solness had an adulterous fling 10 years earlier, when she was a 20-year-old student of his. Back then, Elena, despite being an avowed feminist, had responded to the revelation of the affair by trying to destroy Mathilde’s reputation. Mathilde has since written a novel about the dalliance, and Elena — who is about to file for divorce — offers to publish it out of spite.
This sordid story is thrashed out over two emotionally charged hours, in a register that toggles uneasily between soapy cliché and cynical sass. (There are several quips about the phallic symbolism of tall buildings.)
The language is laboriously contemporary, with references to safe spaces, power imbalances, cancel culture, reclaiming narratives, slut-shaming, and even “the current witch-huntery of the moment.” That these terms are delivered in tones of knowing weariness only draws further attention to the script’s overdetermined bagginess. And the romantic quarrels feature some of the most stilted and shopworn dialogue that anyone will hear on a West End stage this year.
Lumbered with such material, it is easy to understand the underwhelming drabness of McGregor’s performance. Making his first appearance on a British stage in 17 years, he evinces neither the gravitas of an egotistical doyen nor the frenzied desperation of a lovestruck fool. His passion — for work and women alike — is entirely abstract, and gains no purchase on our emotions.
The vibe of implausibility isn’t helped by Solness’s younger professional rival, Ragnar, who is played by an orange-haired David Ajala in an exaggeratedly camped-up style, for no good reason. Even as he’s seducing Elena’s personal assistant, Kaia (Mirren Mack), he’s a sashaying caricature. To land, this would demand a sparkling, Wildean wit — and there is precious little of that here.
It is largely thanks to Fleetwood that the show holds together at all. Her Elena is poised in her indignation, briefly pitiable when she makes a desperate pass at Ragnar, and almost motherly when she urges Mathilde to accept that no long-term good can come of her involvement with Solness. And she is funny. Bursting in on Solness and Mathilde during an heated set-to, she emits a brusque “sorry,” which gets a big laugh.
Determined to prove he’s still as virile as ever, Solness climbs the tower of the newly constructed church, only to succumb to vertigo. In Ibsen’s play, Mathilde had egged him on in this catastrophically pointless gesture, but in this telling he does it on his own. Elena has seen the light, and checked out. This serves the production’s political agenda but effaces the play’s complexity and saps it of tragedy. Solness’s turmoil is relegated to a banal midlife crisis; he’s just a regular lech.
When Ibsen wrote “The Master Builder,” he was in his 60s and had recently struck up a relationship with an 18-year-old Viennese woman, Emilie Bardach, while on vacation in Austria. The original play explores, in an unforgiving spirt of self-criticism, the absurd predicament in which Ibsen found himself. No one could sensibly accuse him of romanticizing the situation. It is somewhat unfortunate that, in seeking to right a nonexistent wrong, McGregor, 54, and Grandage, 62 — working in collaboration with a much younger female writer — have erected a folly of their own.
My Master Builder
Through July 12 at Wyndham’s Theater in London; mymasterbuilderplay.com.
