My Master Builder
Wyndham’s Theatre, London
★★

THE title of the new play currently showing at Wyndham’s Theatre dangerously invites comparison with the Ibsen classic on which it is loosely based. Comparisons are always odious but here would be a disservice. For, despite all its promise, My Master Builder is a disappointment.

It shouldn’t be. For a start, it’s directed by the highly experienced and accomplished Michael Grandage. Secondly, it stars Ewan McGregor, Kate Fleetwood and Elizabeth Debicki – she of The Crown. Thirdly, it uses a famed Ibsen story as its model. And lastly, it boasts Richard Kent’s stylish design, a glorious, pale steel, slatted set reaching for the stars and letting in light and seascape views to make your spirits soar.

But the difficulty with this play lies in Lila Raicek’s overwritten and somewhat pedestrian script, and in its failure convincingly to bring to life a story supposedly set in the Hamptons in 2025 but actually shaped by a long-gone society.  

Henry Solness is an architect of towering fame: an artist lost in his own imagination. His relationship with his wife Elena is so sour and seemingly loveless that, if this were really 2025, this marriage would long be over. A celebratory party in Henry’s honour is hosted by Elena, so resentfully and with such lurking spite that any sentient attendee would want to get well out of it. And we lose sympathy when Elena uses the event to flaunt her hollow, narcissistic would-be lover, Ragnar, in Henry’s face, unaware that he is already enjoying the eager attentions of the much younger Kaia.

Then Mathilde turns up, putting the cat amongst the pigeons. For Mathilde is none other than Hilde, a young woman with whom Henry was besotted a decade before and for whom he has yearned ever since. What should be an evocation of the overpowering, ever-vivid past seems like an awkward fabrication.

McGregor is easily charismatic on stage and will pull the audiences whatever. But he seems adrift as Henry, with little of his performance suggesting character traits other than his own. His enviable, eternally youthful appearance also works against the midlife crisis theme of the drama, and jars.  

Fleetwood, as you’d expect, gives an assured and technically perfect performance as Elena but is stuck with a deeply unsympathetic character who can’t seduce us. Debicki (Mathilde) meanwhile holds the spotlight as if on the catwalk. That she would succumb to raging passion - even with Ewen McGregor - seems barely possible when their movement around each other is so choreographed and tight.

And an essential facet of theatre is missing here: the subtle observation of living characters: what they do, what they feel, how they interact and what they mean. No space in the script is offered for such scrutiny and there is no pause for breath. Rather, we are offered a stream of often clichéd words, covering mostly backstory and plot. Insight there is little; empathy less. In Raicek’s hands, sadly, this is more melodrama than drama.   

Such potential! But you do wonder: why not just stick to Ibsen?

Runs until July 12. Box Office: wyndhamstheatre.co.uk