Review

The Master Builder, Old Vic, review: 'extraordinary'

Jane Shilling 4 February 2016 • 10:13am

The Master Builder at the Old Vic Credit: Manuel Harlan

From his strangely sexy Voldemort to his triumph last year as John Tanner in the National Theatre’s production of Shaw’s Man and Superman, Ralph Fiennes is the epitome of a particular type of wounded masculine charisma. And few theatrical protagonists exude that quality with more appalling potency than Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder, Halvard Solness.

“The Master Builder,” David Hare wrote recently, reflecting on his new adaptation of Ibsen’s play for Matthew Warchus’s Old Vic production, “is a play that changes its apparent subject more times than any I can think of... It moves almost everywhere between the everyday and the sublime.”

In a little under three hours, Ibsen’s wild late drama – written in 1892 when he was 64 – moves from dubious property development to madness, middle-aged infatuation, wish-fulfilment and the mystical ascent of a church steeple to commune with the Almighty, via an excoriating anatomy an unhappy marriage and lost children.

At its most basic level, The Master Builder reflects aspects of Ibsen’s own life: his troubled marriage, his infatuation with a young woman, Emily Bardach, whom he had met in the Tyrol in 1889 and, perhaps, his own sense as a mature artist that younger talents were close behind him: “Some figure,” as Solness puts it, “will emerge out of the dark, screaming ‘Get out of the way.” And not far behind others will follow, all yelling and shouting, ‘Enough! Get out of here!’"

Rob Howell’s extraordinary designs surround Solness’s drafting office and his home, with its three ominously empty nurseries, with a writhing tracery of blackened spars – a reference to the family home of his wife, Aline (Linda Emond) which fortuitously burned down, clearing a plot of land on which his successful building career flourished – but at terrible cost: the loss of their infant twin sons.

Within this space, Fiennes’s Solness sprawls and blusters, treating his employees – a broken rival builder, Knut Brovik (James Laurenson), his son, Ragnar (Martin Hutson) with bluff contempt while lazily exercising his powers of sexual fascination on Ragnar’s tremulous fiancée, Kaja (Charlie Cameron).

Ralph Fiennes in The Master Builder Credit: Manuel Harlan

Into this uneasy environment erupts an extraordinary apparition: bosom bursting out of her black velvet bodice, sturdy bare legs lavishly revealed by a hitched-up petticoat, red-gold pigtails dangling beneath a black beret, Sarah Snook’s Hilde Wangel is half profane Girl Guide, half fallen angel.

She has come, she announces, to claim the kingdom that Solness promised her 10 years ago when she was a child of 12. They met – or so she claims – at the topping-out ceremony for the last church he built. He defied his crippling vertigo to place a wreath on the weather-vane at the very top of the steeple, then he kissed her and promised to return in ten years’ time. It is 10 years to the day since that meeting.

Snook’s Wangel is a creature of infinite complexity: beneath a bold, minxy manner (scarcely has she arrived at Solness’s home than she demands that he arrange for her dirty underwear to be laundered) are intimations of a troubled home life and a powerful identification with loss and suffering: her garden scene with Linda Emond’s Aline is a masterly vignette of fleeting tenderness.

Matthew Warchus’s beautifully controlled and intelligent production is all shifting nuance and finely calibrated detail, from Gary Yershon’s subtle score to the faint drift of dry ice that intimates Hilde’s fatal otherworldliness and the remarkable nuances of physicality with which the actors embody their roles – Fiennes’s clumsy delicacy; Aline’s tense repression; Hilde’s dangerous lushness. The final, extraordinary moment seems both utterly shocking and the inevitable conclusion of all that has gone before.