The Master Builder at Arcola Theatre – review

The Master Builder probably isn’t many people’s favourite Ibsen play. Inspired in part by the ageing playwright’s own affair with an 18-year-old student and an ongoing relationship with the daughter of a family friend, it’s a slow-burning and often befuddling portrait of a midlife crisis in which there’s virtually no humour and none of the characters are particularly sympathetic.

Using David Edgar’s translation, Arcola boss Mehmet Ergen’s contemporary production is set against a glossy black laminated floor and a wall filled with architectural models and stylised white tree branches (designed by Robert Innes Hopkins). It’s chic, skeletal and Scandinavian, and it’s clear that there’ll be little warmth found here despite the protagonist insisting that he designs homes, not houses.

The title character Halvard Solness (Greg Hicks, excellent as always) doesn’t have the right to call himself an architect with his lack of formal training, having learned everything on the job. He’s like an aloof art school lecturer who can’t conceal his dislike of his students and is inveterately afraid of competition from the younger generations.

A bully through and through, he took on father–and–son team Knut (Robin Hooper) and Ragnar Brovik (Ryan Wichert) when their own practice failed but the gesture was all about control. He refuses to sign off Ragnar’s designs and keeps him on board by employing his mousy fiancée Kaja (Jade Williams) in an administrative capacity, while carrying on a half-hearted affair with her.

Only the lead trio is at all fleshed out, reducing the rest of the cast to cameos (Peter Guiness plays Doctor Herdal, who serves as a sort of bridge between the characters). Sally George, as Solness’s wife Aline, is the closest thing the play has to a sympathetic character. She’s a figure of austere elegance with her twisted plaits and killer heels and air of brisk efficiency covering up the hollowness of her existence. She lost three-week-old twin boys when her breast milk was “poisoned” following the shock when her family home burned down and her marriage has been dead ever since.

Stealing the show is a superb debut from Louisa Binder as backpacker Hilde Wangel, who compellingly inhabits a tricky role that could be painfully artificial. Hilde first met Solness a decade previously as a 13-year-old when he built a church for her village (his last ecclesiastical commission) and she claims that he kissed her and promised to build her a castle in the sky. Binder makes her thoroughly conniving, yet it’s possible to believe that she really did take him at his word and continues to believe it. The character serves as a kind of therapist to whom both the pathologically repressed husband and wife open up and, in the process, share their backstories with the audience.

Everything comes back to the phallic motif of the steeple that Solness erected and crowned with a wreath, which so impressed Hilde. There’s a considerable amount to admire in this production, but it is ultimately something of a hollow edifice.