Whatever Irish
playwright Frank McGuiness may
have brought to the table with his controversial
new English rendering of Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House a decade ago, that invigoration is
nowhere near
his leaden adaptation of The Master Builder, having its US debut at
the Irish
Rep in Soho; but to be fair, as
infelicitous as some of the stilted and academic-sounding constructions
may
sound, I do, truly, challenge anyone to make this play work
sufficiently.
Its
tortured hero, the so-called Master Builder because for lack of formal
education,
he cannot claim the title architect, is
Halvad Solness (James Naughton), who has a rock-star
reputation,
yet a menopausal man’s fear of the encroaching new generation. He feels
that
his passion for art has caused him to sacrifice his own happiness and
that of
his wife Aline (Kristen Griffith), to
say nothing of the lives of his long-dead infant twins…yet unlike
Arthur
Miller’s equally haunted industrialist Joe Keller, in All My Sons (also
newly revived some twenty blocks uptown), he does not suffer from
self-delusion, but rather overdoses on introspection and
self-flagellation; nor
does he have an equivalent guilty secret, only the dread that if he
does not
stand guard with vigilance, he will pay for his success. How? Who
knows? His
crisis is entirely existential!
The
character who draws all this musing and speechifying out of him—who may
even exist solely for the purpose—is a vivacious young woman, Kaja (Letitia
Lange) who simply shows up on
his
doorstep, having met him once, ten years ago, when she was 12, at the
site and
celebration of one of his architectural triumphs, where he held her and
kissed
her (many times, says the play, the notion of child molestation
creating not
even a mild shadow in Ibsen’s vision) and bade her to visit him ten
years hence.
It is a goal for which she has (apparently) lived for the last decade
and which
she does now, realizes, prompting him to unburden his fears, prompting her
in
turn to embolden him, that he may release his fear of young talent and
reach,
figuratively and literally, for new heights.
It
all makes for a stultifying evening of philosophical gobbledygook and
watching
Mr. Naughton palpably struggle with and sometimes stumble through long,
flatulent speeches; the struggle and stumbling borne not of any lack of
skill
or preparedness, but rather the fact that the story is so slender and
inconsequential to Ibsen’s thematic purpose that he’s flailing away for
lack of
emotional grounding. (Think about it: when’s the last time an actor
made an
impression upon you while playing a vague apprehension?) Miss Lange
does better
as his philosophical foil, but that’s because Kaja at least has a
mission, and
that allows the actress to motivate her speechifying
with an active goal. The other actors are reduced to props in smaller,
functional (or non-functional, as the case may be) roles. For the
record, the
director is Ciaran O’Reilly.