It's both brave and bracing to welcome new voices to the West End, but sometimes one wonders if such exposure necessarily works to the benefit of those involved. And so it is with My Master Builder, American writer Lila Raicek's Ibsen-adjacent play that nods throughout at the Norwegian scribe's scorching 1892 The Master Builder only to suggest that director Michael Grandage might have been better off staging that classic title instead: his Wild Duck, dating back to his Donmar tenancy, remains the stuff of legend.
The onetime Tony winner for Red has certainly given the show a deluxe physical production. Richard Kent's airy set, shimmeringly lit by the great Paule Constable, transports us to the waterside realm of the tonier corners of the Hamptons, where a "starchitect" called Henry Solness (Ewan McGregor) is being feted at a celebratory gala that doesn't quite go according to plan. His latest structure - a chapel possessed of the dizzying heights you'll recall from Ibsen's original - is being unveiled amidst much fanfare, which in turn allows the re-emergence into Henry's midst of Mathilde (The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki, below left) - a first-time novelist of a book called Master who is this play's Barnard-educated equivalent to Ibsen's siren-like Hilde Wangel.
As with its celebrated forbear, My Master Builder suggests the cumulative weight, even burden, of experience, devolving pride of place in this instance not just to Mathilde but to Elena (Kate Fleetwood), Henry's publishing dynamo of a wife (think Miranda Priestly) whose tart tongue knows how to lance its targets. Poised to divorce her husband of nearly 20 years, Elena's bitterness comes inflected by the couple's shared loss of a son whose memory they are keen to conserve.
What ensues is a triangular transfer of affections, complicated not terribly convincingly by the preening Ragnar (David Ajala), Henry's eco-conscious protege and possible usurper who is soon parading about wearing not very much and disappearing now and again for the inevitable shag. (The central quintet is completed by Mirren Mack's Kaia, a onetime college classmate of Mathilde.)
But whereas Ibsen works by layered insinuation and intrigue, My Master Builder spells everything out, often in fruity language that can be tough to take. "I'd never felt such agony and ecstasy all at once," notes Henry in passing, in what is presumably a nod to Irving Stone, whereas we're told later on of a character "too beautiful to be real". Rem Koolhaas and Philip Johnson are amongst the architecture titans dutifully name-checked, though one wonders how much patience they would have for Mathilde's report that "my heart was beating like a drum". (I'm still puzzling out Ragnar's second-act assertion that "sometimes a steeple is just a steeple".) The ending, preordained by its source, transfers Ibsen's decisive closing line from one character to another without much sense of hubris or shame or the catalcysms that for many lie in wait. (A "little troll" reference lands us squarely in Ibsen territory.)
The occasion of the play is the return to the London stage after 17 years of a screen name who was last seen as Iago in the Donmar's Othello and, before that, as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls - both directed, as here, by Grandage. So it's rather puzzling to note that McGregor often seems peripheral to action that is powered by the two women, Debicki's silken siren and Fleetwood's fiery spouse (pcitured above left) commanding attention even when the writing careers towards cliche. One can understand Raicek's primary interest in the female perspective, as is fair enough but leaves Henry in an essentially reactive role that doesn't prepare us for the tragic reckoning that awaits.
All involved surely deserve credit for taking a risk and granting an unknown author so considerable a leg up. But I couldn't help but think of Penelope Skinner's Lyonesse from a season or two ago as another world premiere not yet ready for primetime. My Master Builder is seductive to the eye throughout, but for a play steeped in second chances and the notion of returning, metaphorically speaking, to the emotional well, this study in "the tragic wreckage of the past" exerts insufficient hold over the present.
- My Master Builder at Wyndham's Theatre to July 12
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
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