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Express Tribune
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
McGregor returns to the West End stage
The new Ibsen-inspired play My Master Builder digs into modern-day relationship politics, actor Ewan McGregor said at the show's official opening night on Tuesday. Back on stage in the West End for the first time in 17 years, Emmy award winner McGregor, known for on-screen roles such as Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, said he loves doing theatre. "The audience teach you what works, what doesn't work," he said, adding that the bond actors have on stage "you can't really find in the film world". Set in the present day in The Hamptons in New York State, My Master Builder explores what happens when powerful publisher Elena Solness (Kate Fleetwood) throws her architect husband Henry Solness (McGregor) a dinner party – attended by a former student and love interest of his, played by Elizabeth Debicki. "It really is an interesting look at sexual politics, relationship politics of today versus the way that The Master Builder was written ... in the late 1800s," McGregor said. Inspired by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's 1892 play The Master Builder, My Master Builder came from writer Lila Raicek's own experience of being treated like a pawn in a powerful couple's marriage. "I realised that this framework of this twisted love triangle was actually very much inspired by Ibsen. So Ibsen's kind of a scaffolding," she said. Unlike in Ibsen's play, her female characters are at the forefront, along with the men," Raicek said. "Every character holds equal weight ... our allegiances ... are with everyone in the play," she said. "It's about how people re-narrate their memories ... we really excavate what the two women in that story have to say to one another and how they reframe narratives to suit themselves or to manipulate one another," actor Kate Fleetwood explained. While McGregor played on Broadway in 2014's The Real Thing with Maggie Gyllenhaal, his last performance in London was in 2008 in director Michael Grandage's Othello. Reuters
New European
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Ewan McGregor is superb as Ibsen meets Succession
If you want My Master Builder reviewed in just three words it's Ibsen meets Succession. Lila Raicek has taken it upon herself to radically redesign the Norwegian playwright's 1892 drama The Master Builder. She switches the action to the present-day Hamptons where Ewan McGregor plays an achingly trendy architect struggling to keep his career and sanity intact as his family and competitors plot against him. His embittered wife (Kate Fleetwood) invites Mathilde (Elizabeth Debicki, the later of two Princess Dianas in The Crown) to a party and it emerges she has a sinister ulterior motive: her invitee is an ex of her husband intent on revenge. McGregor's missus, meanwhile, has her eyes on a rival architect – played by David Ajala – whose Speedos have also won the admiration of her assistant (Mirren Mack). It's a twisted climbing frame of human misery that Raicek has constructed and the actors make the most of it: McGregor is on great form – world-weary and despairing – and the women, all with their own agendas, are all magnificently brought to life. A play about architects cries out for startlingly good sets and Richard Kent rises magnificently to the occasion, evoking sunny days at the Hamptons every bit as impressively as its central character's vast glass towers. Michael Grandage as director gives all the talents involved the chance to shine and it makes for a uniquely satisfying night of theatre. After directing the film My Policeman and now My Master Builder, it can surely only be a matter of time before he revives My Beautiful Launderette.
Telegraph
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
British theatre needs to start treating the classics with respect
Earlier this week, I witnessed Ewan McGregor's theatrical return in My Master Builder. The 54-year-old actor has not been seen on the London stage in 17 years, and his homecoming has made headlines. The production itself, however, at Wyndham's Theatre, seemed to me the real story. It's an extremely tenuous update of Ibsen's 1892 play Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder), about Halvard Solness, a self-made man whose lack of formal training prevents him from calling himself an architect, and whose life is brought tumbling down by the reappearance of a piquant young woman, Hilda, with whom he was once infatuated. In this tacky new version by Lila Raicek, I cared little for Solness, here a self-satisfied, espadrille-wearing starchitect, and even less for Hilda, now known as 'Mathilde' and played by The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki with all the fervour of a saluki left out in the rain. My Master Builder is being billed as a new play, but it's a thin approximation of a classic that's vivid and psychologically rich. Because this is the thing about Ibsen: like all great artists, he's always contemporary. A really great production of The Master Builder, such as that seen at the Old Vic in 2015 with Ralph Fiennes and Sarah Snook, makes you confront its stark modernity. You don't need a rewrite to make it hit home. But My Master Builder is part of a trend to 'update' theatrical classics – and Ibsen is particularly susceptible. Across town, the Lyric Hammersmith is currently staging a version of Ghosts in which the sickness of Helena Alving's son isn't syphilis but a sort of manifestation of his father's toxicity. And at the Duke of York's Theatre a year ago, I saw Thomas Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People, which starred Matt Smith, and I loathed it: Ostermeier turned what should have been a timely tale about freedom of speech and the perils of group-think into a terrible dollop of student agitprop. Ibsen is the most frequently performed European playwright in Britain. After him comes Chekhov, who's treated only a little better than his Norwegian 19th-century counterpart. Recent radical versions of both The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull have managed to convince us that Arkadia, Anya and the rest are very much our contemporaries – though the latter, also directed by Ostermeier, was patchy. But things can go badly wrong: in 2014, I saw a production of Three Sisters at the Southwark Playhouse in which the titular ladies, stranded implausibly in a far-off country, pined for London (when they were all clearly wealthy enough to book the first flight home). We could blame Patrick Marber for all of this. In 1995, his play After Miss Julie transposed Strindberg's 1888 tragedy of desire, Miss Julie, across class barriers to Attlee's Britain. (It was originally directed, coincidentally, by the estimable Michael Grandage, who's also responsible for My Master Builder.) But Marber is a sublime talent and managed to make a new play in its own right, while respectfully teasing out what makes Strindberg so important, not least the overwhelming psychological attrition. I appreciate that part of theatre's duty is to reinvent old works; and the recent success of shows such as Oedipus, starring Lesley Manville (and also at Wyndham's Theatre), proves that there's always an appetite for radical takes on the most ancient of stories. But adaptation needs a skilled hand. That latest version of Sophocles's tragedy was adapted and directed by Robert Icke, who has made his name deconstructing classics and bringing out their cerebral nature in surprising and shocking ways. Think of his famous Hamlet with Andrew Scott, first performed in 2017: it kept a lot of Shakespeare's text, but re-ordered it in a fascinating way, making it more urgent, less declamatory. And Icke has made a successful translation of Ibsen, with The Wild Duck in 2018, showing a clear and cohesive grasp of his source material and never forgetting the play's ultimate message: that we're all, ultimately, propelled by self-delusion. The problem is that Icke is bordering on a national treasure, and few can match his level of dramatic erudition. My overriding feeling, looking around at the state of British theatre, is that you should take on rewriting landmark works only if you're certain of living up to the original. I'll be interested to see how a new version of Euripides's The Bacchae – announced by Indhu Rubasingham on Tuesday as a part of her inaugural season as National Theatre artistic director – turns out, not least because it's the first time that a debut playwright (Nima Taleghani) has been let loose on the capacious Olivier Stage. Even if Marber started the trend, I think the 2020s has seen directors cede more and more ground to writers. Dramatists seem compelled to muck around with their source material and make it virtually unrecognisable. It's as if producers were too afraid to proudly present the classics, lest the audience feel they're being forced to pay top dollar to watch old material. And it's particularly frustrating that this is happening when in most other respects, the theatre industry has – like many other creative sectors – become miserably risk-averse. Although I disliked Raicek's play, I didn't want to: she clearly has an ear for dialogue, and she could have been commissioned to write something entirely new. But a wholly new play by a young playwright is becoming increasingly rare. Theatre needs to do two distinct things. One, give those young talents time to write, and produce, new work; and two, revere the greatest works of our past in the way they deserve. They're classics for a reason – and half-baked attempts to make them appealing to modern audiences will only put off the new generation that British theatres need in order to thrive.
Time Out
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
My Master Builder
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.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My Master Builder review – Ewan McGregor's cheating starchitect is torn down
Henrik Ibsen's Icarus-like architect is indubitably the patrician protagonist of his play The Master Builder. The women of that play revolve around him like acolytes, from his obliging wife to an infatuated bookkeeper and, controversially, the romanticised figure of Hilda, who reminds him of 'kisses' between them when he was a renowned builder and she just a child. In Lila Raicek's modern take, his wife – clever, accomplished and angry – is the fulcrum. Henry Solness (Ewan McGregor) is a 'starchitect' and Elena Solness (Kate Fleetwood) is the head of a publishing empire who has arranged a dinner, inviting Henry's long-estranged student, Mathilde (Elizabeth Debicki), with whom he had a tryst 10 years ago, when the Solness's young son had just died. Love then was mixed with grief. Now it is reignited when Mathilde reminds Solness of what they meant to each other, retrospectively. 'All that grief and all that rapture,' says Solness, as his memories come rushing back. Directed by Michael Grandage, this is Ibsen-adjacent rather than an adaptation or straight translation. Mathilde is given power and agency: she is a journalist and has written a novel inspired by her affair. There are throwaway references to Norway but the play is set in the Hamptons, with a lovely symbolist set by Richard Kent whose design has flecks of David Hockney in the flat blue sea in the backdrop and a modernist white slatted structure in the foreground which represents the chapel that Henry has rebuilt (it burnt down 10 years ago and took the life of his young son). This is very much a play about the consequence of infidelity on a marriage, and a wife's pained rage (Ibsen's Hilda was apparently inspired by real-life associations he had with younger women). Fleetwood is magnetic as Elena and she eclipses McGregor, who is boyishly earnest in his relationship with Mathilde, despite playing the older man. He seems genuinely in love and does not have the bearing of the narcissist he is supposed to be. There is not quite the chemistry between Mathilde and Henry either, although both actors are able in their parts. Mathilde's novel is called Master and there is some effort to evoke psychosexual power dynamics between them, but this does not contain enough heat. The script reckons with the problematic aspects of Ibsen's play in many ways but also complicates them. There is talk of Henry's grooming of the young Mathilde and Elena tries to create a #MeToo moment of public shaming but Mathilde is reluctant to define her experience as such. The clash between father and son, from Ibsen's play, is dealt with in passing between Henry and Ragnar (David Ajala), an influencer and rival architect, rather than with Henry's son. Instead, female camaraderie, treachery and generational difference is explored. Elena's assistant, Kaja (Mirren Mack), mocks her so-called feminism and Mathilde speaks of how Elena 'slut-shamed' her after her affair with Henry, while Elena herself mocks the younger women for all their talk about agency and power. A debate around the good/bad feminist is opened up in their judgments of each other but it sounds rather conceptual. The play is full of plot, especially in Elena's many machinations. There are moments of great intensity, mostly in the scenes featuring Fleetwood, and real candescence to the writing at its best. The focus on the women is interesting and intriguing, even though it means Henry feels rather spare to the drama. This is a story not of genius men building castles in the air for their princesses but of what destruction they wreak in their homes in so doing. Really, it is the drama of The Master Builder's Wife. At Wyndham's theatre, London, until 12 July
