In their seminal essay Desire/Love, Lauren Berlant proposes that the 'love plot' - the story which promises that our desires can be made coherent - is characterised by destabilisation and a resolution that symbolises shifts in power.
It is through this lens that one might consider the romantic, platonic, and erotic entanglements in New York playwright Lila Raicek’s West End debut, My Master Builder. Following the unveiling of starchitect Henry Solness (Ewan McGregor)’s major restoration project, a last supper of sorts takes place in a breezy, secluded Hamptons home, conjured with effortless sophistication by Richard Kent’s costume (a crisp, breezy range of East Coast resortwear) and set design (a luminous ocean backdrop and a sheer, slatted sculpture-staircase-monument).
Despite Raicek’s laudable attempt to enrich the source material, written over a century ago by then-sexagenarian Henrik Ibsen inspired by his affair with an eighteen year-old, by tugging at contemporary threads - most visible in the crackling interactions between Elena (Kate Fleetwood) and Mathilde (Elizabeth Debicki) - of sexual agency, subversive power and female rage, the subject is perhaps more simple: the banal, destructive power of fantasy.
Raicek’s thematic ambitions are compelling but falter under lengthy, symbol-laden dialogue. Movement is also natural, restrained - perhaps a nod to Ibsen’s realism - and is mostly deployed in the first act as physical comedy by Henry’s former mentee and Elena’s object of desire, Ragnar (David Ajala). This inadvertently undermines the gravity of Henry and Mathilde’s intimate encounters in the second act. In a later scene, welcome tension erupts in a crescendo of swept-away plates and toppled glasses. Perhaps more physicalisation throughout might have unlocked the rage, passion, and possession constrained by the poetic writing.
The characters approach their fraught entanglements more as conceptual exercises than the truly complex negotiations they are. 'Everything is a negotiation,' seethes Elena, though the chemistry required to feel what is exactly at stake is missing between characters, particularly between McGregor’s boyishly earnest Henry and his lost ingénue, Mathilde.
Even as we near the ultimate climax between Henry and Mathilde, there is no release, no sadistically satisfying reckoning. McGregor’s charisma as Henry blurs the line between charm and revulsion, making it unclear whether to cringe or recoil from Henry’s middle-aged clichés that he will ‘whisk away’ Mathilde as well as his troubling history of forgotten promises. Henry does ultimately fulfil one promise to Mathilde, though the act exposes not triumph but fragility and floundering impotence, appropriate yet still unsatisfying.
However, it may be the diminishing of this central love plot that throws the play’s other power exchanges into focus. Interactions between Elena, her assistant Kaia (Mirren Mack) and Mathilde offer intriguing commentary on the post-#MeToo landscape, grappling with notions of good vs. bad feminism, the weaponisation of the ‘coming out’ narrative, and subversion of the ‘groomed protégé’ trope. Some conflicts prove underwhelming: strong performances from Mack and Ajala as her secret lover cannot disguise the narrative’s disinterest in their subplot, which quietly dissipates. Similarly, the revelation of Kaia’s betrayal promises honest confrontation but lands softly, disappointingly.
In this contemporary rendition, Raicek’s portrayal of Elena and Mathilde is the play’s strength. Mathilde is afforded more agency than her counterpart in Ibsen’s original, which is welcome in this century. Beneath Elena and Mathilde’s destabilisations/resolutions lie the raw rage of a deeper power imbalance: the desperate desire to preserve family and identity at all costs when one’s partner is unreliable, indifferent or unknowable. Fleetwood delivers Elena with blistering ferocity, making her perhaps the production’s most fully realised character.
My Master Builder is less about lost love and more a study of the architecture of power built around fantasy. Its sharpest thesis: betrayal does not kill attachment. It too is a love plot - a fantasy of love's destructive/reparative balance.
My Master Builder’s limited run at Wyndham’s theatre, London, continues until 12 July. Tickets: here.
Review: ELT Photo: Johan Persson