My Master Builder: Ewan McGregor struggles to raise the roof in his stage return

Telegraph

29-04-2025

Ewan McGregor is back on the London stage after a 17-year absence. You have to rewind to late 2007 for his last theatre credit (one of only a handful in his career): playing a smooth, sly Iago to Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello at the Donmar.
Such was the clamour to behold the star up-close back then that some tickets were reportedly changing hands for more than £1,000. Whether the same frenzy will attend his return to theatreland in a reimagining of Ibsen's mysterious late play The Master Builder by New York-based Lila Raicek (which sees him reunite for a third time with director Michael Grandage) seems more doubtful.
Thanks not least to Star Wars, McGregor's name remains no small box-office draw. Yet, while it's nice to have him treading the boards again – his allure undimmed – he struggles to attain the intensity required to raise the roof as Solness, a Scot-Brit 'starchitect' whose ascendancy is poised for a vertiginous fall.
The Master Builder (1892) is a portrait (indeed a self-portrait) of a successful soul in torment. Ibsen's abiding theme was the 'false life', one built on rotten foundations. In A Doll's House, the reckoning, in which a marriage and way of living collapses, carries a cathartic release and rebirth. Here, however, the direction of travel is more ominous; the catalyst for Solness's implosion is a young woman (Hilde) who re-enters his world 10 years after a sexualised encounter that bound them together; her reappearance, ahead of a new building being unveiled, brings to a head personal guilt, marital woe and mortal dread.
Given how often of late high-profile men have reaped the whirlwind of rapacious behaviour, the work seems ripe for a topical update. But Raicek's spin – re-located to the monied Hamptons on July 4 – is less serrated than expected. Exuding a benign, almost youthful aura of laid-back charm, this Solness has little of the customary embattled angst – and at 54, the age-gap between him and Elizabeth Debicki's revenant Hilde isn't so glaring as to match the original's inherent provocation. The women are given more agency by Raicek – the willowy American interloper is poised to release a novel about her 'Master' and interview him too, while Solness's high-powered publisher wife (Kate Fleetwood's gloweringly spiky Elena) is ready to serve divorce papers; she's half-angling for female solidarity.
What should deepen and tauten the drama alas throws up inconclusive thoughts on empowerment and a ton of emotional overstatement. It's hard to care about this lot, including David Ajala's Ragnar, a pretentious and rather pre-fab flamboyant star in the field, and Elena's nondescript assistant (Mirren Mack's Kaia). Perky allusions to David Bowie aside, the writing clunks, and the strain on the cast shows.
Instead of gathering momentum, a mood of melodrama takes hold, with McGregor finally seeming rather lost amid Richard Kent's imposing, climbable set of horizontal slats and secreted stairs. Instead of busting free of the original, the chic, effortful result proves an intriguing but frustrating half-way house.