There has been a note of enigma to the promotion of this new West End drama by largely unknown US playwright Lila Raicek. The official line is that it’s a response to Ibsen’s The Master Builder but not a rewrite, but there has been a pointed refusal - in cast interviews and other publicity - to say any more about the specifics of the play.
Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage.
Or if we’re going for the idea that there was a more poetic mystery, I guess the big revelation is that the play is somewhat autobiographical. It’s *My* Master Builder because Raicek has incorporated her own life into it, or at least one experience (that she owns up to, anyway). She was invited to a posh dinner party and realised upon arrival that she’d been cast as a pawn in a weird psychosexual drama between her hosts, a married couple. First world problems and all that, but it gave her a route into updating Ibsen’s odd late play about a tortured architect haunted by a past encounter.
Henry Solness (McGregor) is a starchitect who lives in the Hamptons with his publisher wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood). They are throwing a party for the completion of a local arts centre he’s designed, that is intimately connected to the sad early death of their son. It doesn’t take long to determine their marriage isn't going well: Elena lets slip to her long-suffering assistant Kaia (Mirren Mack) that she has divorce papers ready to serve Henry, but isn’t sure if she actually will.
Following the opening of the centre a more intimate dinner party is planned, and on the guestlist is Mathilde (Elizabeth Debicki), innocuously billed as a journalist friend of Kaia’s. In fact she turns out to be a former student of Henry’s who he had a passionate affair with a decade ago, when she went by the name Hilda.
The original Master Builder is a weird, stodgy play, and Raicek’s version does a lot to address its issues: there are much better female characters and none of the old stultifying symbolism. And Raicek’s drama isn’t simply about how Henry has taken advantage of Mathilde, even though that’s how performative girl boss Elena contemplates spinning it. The playwright scrutinises the concept of power imbalance in a relationship and refuses to come up with an easy answer over whether it’s appropriate for Henry and Mathilda to have been involved.
The main trouble is that there is a power imbalance within Michael Grandage’s production: Debicki and Fleetwood are hardly nobodies, but McGregor is the big name in this female-centric rewriting of Ibsen. Which might not be an issue if Henry was a really great role, but it feels like McGregor hogs the lines and the stage time, while the women hog the bits where Raicek actually has something interesting to say.
The best thing about Ibsen’s original is his protagonist Halvard, a distant, difficult genius gradually brought to earth over the story’s duration. Speaking in his own accent, McGregor’s Henry is basically a nice enough regular bloke – flawed of course, but probably considerably more down to earth than the average middle-aged architectural giant. It feels like Raicek and Grandage have gone out of their way not to make him seem toxic or overly complicated - it’s stressed that Henry and Mathilda’s affair wasn’t even consummated.
I sort of get it: if Henry’s actions were clearly abusive or creepy the play’s internal debate would never get started. Younger women do have relationships with more powerful older men and clearly many of them work out fine. But taking pains to make Henry broadly inoffensive leaves him as a fairly boring character. He’s the biggest role, and we hear lots from him: about his grief, about his guilt, about his desires, about architecture. But pare away the words and there’s nothing much happening, just a nice guy blundering through a genteel midlife crisis.
Debicki is solid: her Mathilda is somewhat inscrutable, but largely – one senses – because she’s paralysed by ambivalence. She goes to the party unsure about how she feels towards Henry; although it’s not really a ta-da role, it’s the engine of the play, as she processes her feelings and resentments - ultimately she gets to have the casting vote in what happens to this marriage. As with Henry, the character feels a bit tidy and undamaged, all things considered, but certainly she’s more thoughtfully written than her Ibsen equivalent. (Maybe this is a terrible thing to say, but it’s hard to escape the fact Debicki is incredibly tall - the fact she looms over McGregor further disrupts the idea of power imbalance).
Raicek has gone so far to make Henry and Mathilda seem reasonable that they’re ultimately dull, and the fireworks are delegated to the supporting cast. More entertaining than both her co-leads put together is Fleetwood. Essentially a scheming panto villain, she’s enormous fun but only makes Henry look even more sympathetic - she gets humanised a bit more later, but her outrageous behaviour lets Henry further off the hook.
And David Ajala is a hoot as Ragnar, an unbearable hipster former protege of Henry’s who Elena is desperately trying to shag – he‘s too self-interested to own up to the fact that he’s in a relationship with her PA.
Ultimately Raicek has created as many problems as she’s solved in trying to ‘fix’ the original story. Which is no reason not to do it, but her generally thoughtful look at power imbalance and the nature of infidelity lacks fireworks beyond the famous faces. It retains Ibsen’s wild ending, but when it comes it all feels a bit unearned.
