Going into My Master Builder I was a bit cautious. I’m always nervous when there is stunt casting involved. A show cannot live or die on one actor alone and I feel like sometimes having a massive star power in the room can suck up the space for everyone else. I am happy to say that’s not the case here. In a strange turn of events, Ewan McGregor actually faded into the background, even while in the lead role. My first reaction was to immediately blame the actor, that he was resting on the laurels of being the Ewan McGregor and not putting in the work. But upon further reflection, I do believe that the issue is much larger. The script.
Ibsen’s The Master Builder was a beautiful piece of work that depicted an ego maniac at the beginning of his downfall. The carefully planned infrastructure of Solness’s life is starting to crumble. His career is beginning to decline, he has Ragnar who is working his way up the architectural firm. He has the confidence to bring his mistress into his home with his wife and believe he will never be caught. His marriage to Aline is falling a part, as I said his mistress is in his home, and he and Aline are still reeling from the loss of their twin boys. All this creates beautiful tension and a ticking time bomb. One wrong move and the whole structure could cave in on itself. The play feels like an architectural masterpiece in that way.
In Lila Raicek’s adaptation she was trying to bring the women of Ibsen’s play to the forefront. Ibsen wrote incredibly progressive female characters for his time period. But his women were usually forced into these progressive behaviors because of a man’s choices. In Raicek’s adaptation she put the women so far in the foreground that we lost sight of Henry completely. Instead of seeing Aline as this woman who had been dragged around by a domineering husband who was parading his mistress in front of her. We get Aline, the vicious and cruel business woman who steps all over her husband and will plow down anyone who gets in her way. Raicek also paints a world where women are fighting each other instead of their oppressor, which should have been Henry, but there was no fire in his character. He was not written as the villain he was supposed to be, and in some scenes it doesn’t feel like he was written to be anything other than a bystander. She takes Kaia and Hilda and pits them against Aline, this doesn’t put the women at the forefront of the story, it paints them all as villains. Kaia and Hilda hate Aline with a ferocity that does not feel earned. There is zero attempt to understand Aline when she is trying to apologize to Hilda. She was a woman who had lost her son due to her husband’s negligence, then 10 months later finds out that he has an inappropriate relationship with one of his students. I’m not justifying Aline’s choices to attempt to ruin Hilda’s career. But was what I am saying is that if this play was truly focusing on the women, Hilda would have at least given a moment of understanding to Aline and her decisions. What I was desparately craving was a moment for the women to come together and realize they all deserve better than how the men in their lives are treating them, and they can come together to heal and plot revenge on their oppressors. Instead, we receive a script where the women were catty and vicious almost for no point. Henry’s character was so small that it felt like they were all fighting over nothing.
All in all I think the designers and the actors did as much as they could with what they were given. I think there is absolutely a version of a modern adaptation of The Master Builder that could be successful, this just wasn’t it.
Theatre in London U of A 