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 t h e a t r e

THE GREEKS, who invented theatre, knew what it was for -- to entertain and to ask hard questions about human existence. Fortunately, in the current economics-driven rush to put on musicals and light comedies, a few Canadian producers and directors are still staging drama that matters.
Last week, "The Master Builder" by the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen began a six-week run (until Feb. 24) at The Royal Alexandra Theatre, in an acclaimed British production directed by Sir Peter Hall. Starring stage and screen luminary Alan Bates ("Women in Love," "Far from the Madding Crowd") and Gemma Jones (who plays Mrs. Dashwood in the current film "Sense and Sensibility"), Ibsen's demanding play represents a considerable risk for its producers, Ed and David Mirvish, who are better known for importing sure-hit musicals such as "Miss Saigon."

Ibsen [has] a relentless interest in humanity's darker side. Ibsen's "The Master Builder" (1892) spins the tragic tale of Halvard Solness (Bates), a builder and architect in a small Norwegian town. For years, Solness has mercilessly dominated his employees and his melancholic wife, Aline (Jones). But soon after the drama begins, he meets his match with the arrival of the spirited, twentyish Hilde Wangel (Victoria Hamilton). When she strides unannounced into Solness' s house and demands that he honor a love vow he made to her 10 years earlier, the springs of tragedy are set.
This production recognizes the comedy inherent in Solness's situation. Ibsen
is too often played gloomily, but this is a "Master Builder" that crackles with irony and humor. It dares to play with the nearly unbearable tension between the outward decorum of the characters-after all, this is a middle-class Victorian household-and the witches' brew of passions seething beneath. And it does all this with a minimum of self-consciousness, allowing the rich subtext of mythic allusions and ideas to speak for itself.
Bates's Solness commands his office and household with a sharp imperiousness. But a Solness who was merely strong would be insufficient. Bates' s great accomplishment in this part is to convey the shadows that haunt the master builder. Solness has put his feelings (and the feelings of others) aside, in order to become the pure instrument of his own professional success. But his feelings persist nonetheless, in a paranoid moodiness that is tinder to the inflammatory attractions of Hilde. When she batters down his defences and enters his inchoate, infantile emotional life,
he quickly becomes a prisoner of her fantasized vision of him.
Hamilton's portrayal of the young woman is superb. In a role that has often been sabotaged by preciousness or hysteria, she lends Hilde enough robust normality to be sympathetic, while hinting at the deep psychic disturbance that powers her obsession with Solness. It could be argued that Solness himself is a major cause of her unbalanced state. His jestful courting and kissing of her when she was 12 amounts to a form of child abuse-a spiritual rape for which she is now, unconsciously, demanding retribution.
A couple of the supporting roles are badly played, particularly John Normington's all-too-clownish Dr. Herdal. In the end, this is a strong but uneven production that cannot quite make it up the final slopes of Ibsen's greatness.

Vol. 109, Maclean's, 01-29-1996, pp 61(1). © 1996 Maclean Hunter (Canada)

Words from the Wise
by Christopher Winsor

EXPERIMENTAL theatre, for all its occasionally provocative noodling, seems to delight in pissing on the importance of words, as if these little creatures weren't chief among the theatre's basic building blocks. What a treat, then, that last week's two hottest openings are plays that belong to the true literature of the stage.
Mirvish and Co. unveiled their tidy little West End import of Ibsen's "The Master Builder "at the Royal Alex, while necessary angel Richard Rose unleashed the brilliant and biting Howard Barker's "Seven Lears." Both are fine examples of a writers' theatre, although different enough to be foreign to one another.
Ibsen wrote "The Master Builder" just over a hundred years ago, at the age of 64. It's hailed as a difficult masterpiece, because it's both a plausible exercise in naturalism and a metaphor-driven, symbolist foray.
It's chiefly the story of Halvard Solness (Alan Bates), an aging designer-builder who has run into a badly placed wall of career menopause. Solness fears being usurped by "youth," while at the same time desperately needing to be nurtured by it. And on cue, it literally knocks at the door in the form of the voluptuous and irrepressible Hilde Wangel. (Nudge nudge, wink wink.) Yet the play soars far beyond the easily grasped themes of the re-invigorating power of youth, the redemption of man by woman, and the choice of passion and risk over stability and suffocation.
"The Master Builder" is a play rich in imagery and philosophy, in which, for example, a man dizzied by heights builds a tower to get nearer to rage at his God. In which there is baptism by fire -- literally, a tragic house fire that leads to the death of the Solness' twin boys, but which compels Halvard to excellence, building "happy homes for happy families."
This is a parlor-room tragedy, respectful of the unities (the three acts take place in the course of one day) and yet resonant with profound notions of duty, happiness, desire, memory, grief, madness and much more.
The Mirvishes are to be commended for programming it, though the buzz is they will likely lose a ton of cash -- the market for intelligent Scandinavian drama not being what it used to be.
Director (Sir) Peter Hall has retained the period setting of the piece and coaxed appropriately polished performances from the cast. As Halvard, Alan Bates is good
without being dazzling; Gemma Jones as forceful as possible in her role as his sickly and marginalized wife. Victoria Hamilton is suitably warm and rambunctious as Hilde "wild bird" Wangel, though perhaps a bit too informal to be credible. In short, this a conventionally staged, decent production of a great play.

eye WEEKLY, January 25, 1996
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