The Master Builder – Henrik Ibsen, 1892 ★★½

Make Way for Youth

Henrik Ibsen was not the most playful of playwrights, but he did pull off an occasional head fake to confuse his audience. Case in point: The opening act of his later work, The Master Builder.

We open on a scene of both professional and domestic turmoil. Presiding over his home office, Solness the master builder carries on a clandestine relationship with his secretary, Kaja. His wife suspects, and so does Kaja’s fiancé, Ragnar, who works diligently but unhappily as Solness’s assistant. Then comes an early revelation from Solness that he merely toys with the secretary’s affections to keep her working for him, so Ragnar will keep working for him, too.

SOLNESS: But now, you see it’s becoming such a damned nuisance. Day after day I’ve got to walk about here pretending I…And it’s not fair on her, poor thing. [Vehemently] But there’s nothing else I can do! Because if she runs away from me – then away goes Ragnar, too.

It all seems building to a big climax, as we have already witnessed Ragnar’s father – once Solness’s boss, now his ailing underling – ask in vain that his son be given a chance at a commission of his own. Solness is stubborn and cold. Something, it seems, will have to give.

Alas, just as we are wondering how this will sort itself out, a young woman appears at Solness’s door, with a story about an odd meeting she and Solness had in the distant past. Just like that, whoosh, away goes the Ragnar-and-Kaja story. Instead, the play settles into something else entirely, a tale of youth and madness involving Solness and this mysterious young woman, Hilde.

Sarah Snook as Hilde and Ralph Fiennes as Solness, in a 2016 British production of The Master Builder. Image from https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/theatre/643165/Theatre-review-The-Master-Builder-at-The-Old-Vic.

The Master Builder is an often-performed major play of Ibsen’s, if not held in the same regard as his best-known works. I don’t find it a particularly successful play, but it is intriguing, anchored by a pair of enjoyably outsized characters in Solness and Hilde. The issues at the heart of the play are rather cryptic, and the ending rushed and unconvincing, but while it follows its odd course, it keeps you watching and reading.

The issue of a past relationship between Solness and Hilde is at the heart of the play. Did he really make amorous advances on a girl of 12 or 13? Was she genuinely encouraged by this, like she claims, or is she motivated by a more modern sense of disapproval at his trespass?

Solness himself seems skeptical whether this earlier meeting did take place. Maybe he’s just covering for himself. How you take this may depend on the translation, if you aren’t reading Ibsen’s original text. James McFarlane’s translation, which appears in the Oxford World’s Classics volume I read, suggests Solness is completely bewildered by Hilde’s claim because it probably never happened.

Another translation by Michael Meyer, as performed in a 1988 BBC production with Leo McKern as Solness and Miranda Richardson as Hilde, is more open-ended. Solness here seems to harbor more specifically guilty feelings, and is less in the dark initially about Hilde’s identity. Either way, ambiguity reigns.

Miranda Richardson as Hilde and Leo McKern as Solness, in the 1988 BBC adaptation. Image from www.alamy.com.

Guilt is at the heart of the play. It’s just not clear exactly how:

SOLNESS [Puts his hand on her arm]: Listen now…[HILDE makes an impatient gesture with her arm. SOLNESS speaks as though a thought suddenly strikes him.] Or…wait a moment! There’s more in this than meets the eye. I tell you. [HILDE does not move. SOLNESS speaks quietly but emphatically.] I must have thought it all. I must have willed it…wished it…desired it. And then…Mightn’t that be the explanation? [HILDE remains silent. SOLNESS speaks impatiently.] All right, damn it…! So I did do it then!

HILDE [turns her head a little without actually looking at him]: Then you admit it?

SOLNESS: Yes, anything you like.

Solness labors under a curse, which more than any specific behavior in his past impels his involvement with Hilde in the play. A thoroughly modern man in the Nietzschean will-to-power mold, Solness sees his life’s journey as a matter of wanting what he wants, and then somehow getting it, with little or no active agency on his own part. For example, he hated the house he shared with his wife, so it burned down. He wasn’t responsible, but he was well-served enough by the results to feel a sense of cosmically-aligned culpability.

An idea is floated early on that Solness may be going mad. He thinks his wife Aline believes this, too. “You see, in a way…she might have good grounds for thinking so,” Solness tells a family friend, Dr. Herdal. Herdal dismisses this, albeit uncomfortably.

At the moment the thing Solness fears most in life is youth pushing him from the top of his profession. Just as he’s telling Dr. Herdal: “One of these days, youth is going to come here beating on the door…” Hilde does exactly that, a trifle on-the-nose but getting our attention.

What makes Hilde an unreliable witness is the fact she enjoys messing with Solness so much. You can feel her using his foggy memory to her advantage. She knows her attractiveness to him, and wastes no time settling into his house and staking her claim.

Henrik Ibsen in later life. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiPJdu6nG-I.

Henrik Ibsen knew a thing or two about the attraction of young ladies. He was juggling several relationships with youthful admirers during the period of Master Builder’s composition. Three in particular are said to have inspired his conception of Hilde, whom Solness describes at more than one point as a “bird of prey.”

“And why not a bird of prey!” she replies. “Why shouldn’t I go hunting, too? Take the prey I want if I can get my claws into it. And hold it firm.”

Her prey, it soon becomes clear, is Solness himself. Again, the enigmatic question comes up. Is she revenging herself in #MeToo fashion against a man who took liberties with her when she was a girl? Or is she a coquettish nut who gets pleasure from persecuting an innocent man?

An Ibsen-Solness connection has been made since the time of Master Builder’s publication. Throughout this play, Ibsen makes much of Solness’s sense of himself as an artist. Like Solness in his small town, so big a deal that he crowds out the competition, Ibsen by this time was widely regarded as a giant in his chosen field.

Does this parallel bear scrutiny? Solness is actually a builder, not an architect; he leaves the details of calculating stresses and strains to Ragnar’s father. He seems excessively dependent on others, and too clutchy about his reputation to merit Ibsen-level stature. As a writer, Henrik was his own man.

Solness’s work parallels Ibsen’s in one particular: His choice of building. Once, Solness was a great builder of churches, until working for God lost its appeal. Now he prefers to build houses, “warm, cheerful, comfortable homes, where fathers and mothers and their children could live together, secure and happy, and feeling that it’s good to be alive.”

Something of a similar shift in focus happened in Ibsen’s plays, which went from broad-vistaed historical works and intellectual/metaphysical problem plays to domestic dramas. Of course, the families featured in Ibsen’s plays weren’t usually happy ones.

Solness, too, sees the lie of a happy family in his own life:

SOLNESS: All this I somehow have to make up for. Pay for. Not in money. But in human happiness. And not with my own happiness alone. But also with others’. Don’t you see that, Hilde! That’s the price my status as an artist has cost me – and others. And every single day I have to stand by and watch this price being paid for me anew. Over and over again – endlessly!

Does Solness torture himself too much, or not enough? He is a perplexing figure, more so unfortunately than Hilde, who feels less a person in her own right than a rogue figment of Solness’s imagination. In fact, everyone in this play but Solness begins to feel like supercargo after a while, existing only in their relationship to him.

Aline gets in a couple of zingers about her husband’s infidelity, but otherwise behaves in a zombie-like way, prattling on always about her duty. She moans about the loss of two young children, but seems more remorseful about the dolls she lost in the house fire. Her situation should evoke sympathy; instead it brings annoyance. She’s so gormless you don’t wonder why Solness keeps pining after younger alternatives.

As arresting a play as The Master Builder is in its peculiar particulars, I get the sense it ran away from Ibsen at some point. Ibsen himself works back eventually to the Ragnar part of his story, by having Hilde push Solness into giving his underling a chance to build something himself. But this part of the story remains buried by Ibsen’s tight focus on Hilde.   

German-Russian actress Ida Orloff as Hilde watching Solness in the climax of The Master Builder, in a circa-1930 production. Unlike some other, earlier Ibsen plays which were suppressed for years over cultural objections, Master Builder had already been staged in Berlin, London, Oslo, and Copenhagen within a year of its December 1892 publication. Image from https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-orloff-ida-1621889-941945-german-actress-half-length-as-hilde-wangel-58325445.html

The ending of Master Builder feels like Ibsen shortchanging everyone, Solness and this reader included. Hilde demands “a castle in the sky” where she can be a princess. Solness vows to provide her one, as soon as he is done laying a wreath high atop his newest construction before a jubilant gathering of local admirers. Did I mention Solness has a terrible fear of heights, and everyone but Hilde wants him to be careful?

As flat and hard as that ending falls, it doesn’t discount the journey Ibsen takes us on, or the penetrating if sometimes dizzying view he gives us regarding this creative alter ego he constructed of himself, a man too earthbound to entertain empyrean fantasies, but too foolish not to try.