Unlock the publisher's digest free
Roula Khalaf, editor -in -chief of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In the new play by Lila Raicek, the architect Henry Solness took an old building and transformed it into something new: to transform an old church into a place of meditation. Essentially, Raicek did something similar. Work from the drama of Henrik Ibsen in 1892, The master manufacturerShe wrote a new piece that follows roughly the contours of the original but transported it to the Hamptons in 2025, remodeling and expanding certain key characters.
The problems that swirl in the initial vision of Ibsen on an additional weight in the current era. It is an idea rich in potential, but the result seems curiously in wood and inauthentic, even with Ewan McGregor in mind.
When we meet Henry de McGregor, he offers a press conference to mark the opening of his new building. There is already a glimmer of fragility: we learn that it has become the prey of vertigo and cannot rise to the top of its own structure. He will later emerge that the new sanctuary is created in honor of his young son, who died 10 years ago.
Go to the preparations for a party party and all kinds of other demons are starting to get out of the woodwork. The unhappy wife of Henry, Elena (played with a bite and a great driving by Kate Fleetwood), the former apprentice of Henry and now Rival Ragnar (David Ajala); Ragnar is in relation to the assistant of Elena Kaia (Mirren Mack). Meanwhile, Kaia invited her friend, Mathilde, to the party: a young woman who turns out to have a story with Henry since when she was her pupil a decade earlier. As alcohol flows, bad faith swells in the air until you can barely breathe.
Ibsen's original is imbued with symbolism and thick with themes: hubris, guilt, regret and jealousy track down action. The room was partly autobiographical and in response, Raicek brings his own lived experience. A program note explains how she was invited to a swish dinner in the Hamptons where she was clearly a pawn in a game between a married couple. Here, this takes place as a ugly fight with three, producing very busy confrontations on desire, love, abuses of power and the limited agency for women.
But in a timely manner that all this, the situation seems strangely artificial and the dialogue often steep and without air. McGregor suggests that Henry's confident exterior is undermined by sorrow and remorse, but he has trouble animating certain lines of false. “You were like this brilliant bundle of light in the dark tunnel of my life,” he said at some point. Another character talks about someone “undressing you with his eyes” – the kind of cliché who should have disappeared with the first project. And then there is Mathilde herself, which is extended by the original and played with an immense balance of Elizabeth Debicki, but which always looks more like an idea than a person.
The beautiful set of Richard Kent and the eloquent lighting of a constable Paule suggest a liminal location, where fashionable people collide with the brutality of nature. Ajala and Mack bring spirit and spark and the excellent big Michael Grandage directs rhythm. But even he cannot resolve the end melodramatic. This new piece looks like one of these renovations that has not fully worked.
★★ ☆ From
On July 12, mymasterbuilderplay.com
