Henrik Ibsen's exhausting and great The Master Builder carries the weight of the European 19th century on its sturdy Nordic shoulders. The 19th century was the era of heroes and hero worship, the cult of the world as Will and Idea, and most importantly afflicted by a mania for significance. In The Master Builder, everything has a meaning and the meanings have meanings. Ibsen's 1892 play belongs to the same world as Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: the great questions of the day are debated, shaped into emblems, and, then, mined for their significance. The structure of Ibsen's world is fundamentally explicable in terms of psychological factors -- resentment, love, fear, desire and the lust for revenge flow just below the surface of the various declarations of passion that comprise the text. The master builder's vanity and pride are expressed in the encyclopedic shape of the play -- Ibsen wants to put every possible meaning into this work; he labors to make all implications explicit and, then, to develop implications from the implications. In The Master Builder, we find an exposition of feminism, depictions of deadly jealousy compounded by the hero's fear of aging and losing his powers, certainly issues that deeply concerned Ibsen. But we, also, encounter a genius who has made a deal with the devil after the manner of Goethe's Faust (the German play casts a long shadow over all of Ibsen), a study of marriage and its discontents, a social history implying certain uncomfortable truths about the transition from an aristocratic oligarchy to capitalism in Scandinavia, a demonstration of the pathologies of memory, the contortions of sexual desire and abnormal psychology, a dramatized argument about esthetics, and, at the end, a challenge to theology and God Himself. All of these materials are crammed into a two-and-a-half hour play (as performed at the Commonweal Theater on June 6, 2015), also notable for effortlessly combining the most prosaic realism and, indeed, a comedy of manners. with elements of the uncanny and supernatural.
The action of The Master Builder follows a classical structure. Ibsen shows Master Builder Solness, not a licensed architect, but a kind of land developer and general contractor. Solness' construction business is trapped in a rut -- the master builder is suppressing the genius of his young associate to keep him from leaving the business and competing with the firm. Solness accomplishes this objective by deputizing his long-suffering mistress (and secretary) to entice the young associate and bind him to the firm so that he will not leave. Solness' wife is sick, a neurasthenic alcoholic. Everyone is haunted by grief by reason of various tragedies. Solness has built his fortune on rebuilding his wife's manor after a fire that the Master Builder thinks he willed into being destroyed the place. The fire sickened Solness' wife and caused her "poisoned (breast) milk" to kill his two twin sons. Solness is revenging himself upon a former mentor, his associate's father by humiliating the old man, who is also dying. The plot luxuriates in overdetermination: Solness' scheme to have his secretary seduce and, then, marry his associate serves multiple functions: it encumbers the associate and insures that he will not leave, sadistically torments the secretary who helplessly loves the tyrannical Solness, and, further, comprises a key element in the Master Builder's program of systematic humiliation of his former mentor. Just as Solness confesses that he is most afraid of younger competitors rendering him obsolete, and just as he dramatically declares that his enemies are about to come for him and rap at his door, there is, in fact, a pounding outside. A young woman clad in angelic white appears, a sort of exterminating angel, and the entire carefully constructed and nightmarish equilibrium of the Master Builder's world collapses. This is one of the great archetypal plots in world narrative -- a stranger comes to town.
The stranger is Hilda, a 23-year old girl, who claims that the Master Builder did something to her -- possibly rape -- when she was 12. She is the agent for untangling the knots shown to us in the first twenty minutes of the play. If the situation of the Master Builder is initially posited to be one of entanglement and confinement, Hilda seems to offer the aging hero a way out -- she embodies freedom, but, also, destruction. At first, Solness claims not to remember any encounter with Hilda. But Hilda persists in her tale, ultimately, persuading the Master Builder that she was present to urge him upward on the day that the hero climbed a tall tower and placed a wreath on the phallic crown of the structure. Ibsen doesn't settle the question of whether these events, including the rape of the child, actually occurred or if Hilda's account is a fantasy, a constructed memory designed to both seduce and destroy the Master Builder. (In the end, Solness and Hilda seem to be entrapped in a sort of grandiose folie a deux -- Ibsen shows Solness exchanging one kind of cage or another.) The role of Hilda is like Hamlet, inexhaustible, contradictory, and turbulent -- Hilda's actions and words seem motivated by enigmatic, secret eddies and countercurrents of passion. It is certainly one of the greatest parts imaginable for an actress, a part so complex and profound that no single human being is equal to the role. (Hilda is nothing less than a personification of the Master Builder's muse and, therefore, the embodiment, it seems, of Ibsen's inspiration as well.) The part has to be played by a young woman, something that is problematic because of the depth of the role. In the Commonweal production, the role was played by Ana Hagedorn. Hagedorn looks a bit like Reese Witherspoon and has a prominent pointed chin. At first, she seems too plain for the part, but as her influence over the Master Builder increases, Hagedorn finds her métier and is highly effective. The role requires quicksilver alternation between cajoling flirtation, wrathful denunciation, and hysterically needy proclamations of love, desire and adoration. Hilde whipsaws Solness between extremes of hero-worshiping adoration and withering contempt for his cowardice. The play's great ambiguity is existential: has the young woman mysteriously come to stay in Solness' house appeared to destroy the Master Builder or save him? Does the thing that most decisively frees us, also require our death?
The Commonweal's production of the play seemed to me generally strong. Scott Dixon, the actor playing the Master Builder bobbled a few lines, but was, more or less, effective -- he seemed more sympathetic in this play than in Andrei Gregory's powerful production filmed as A Master Builder (2013); in that film, Wallace Shawn is terrifying as Solness; Dixon was less fearsome and seemed more a victim of circumstances. The show is entirely words, dialogue, and feverish proclamations -- it doesn't require any kind of set at all and the production had the courage to let Ibsen's text speak for itself. The set was bare to the point of penury, the costuming was unobtrusive, and the staging simple and competent -- the point was to get anything that might distract from Ibsen's words out of the way. And the show did this successfully.
No comments:
Post a Comment