The Master Builder

Among the most inventive of Ibsen's works and one of his most frequently performed plays, The Master Builder offers audiences a thought-provoking examination of an architect jealous of rivals and haunted by guilt. 


First performed in 1892, Ibsen’s psychological tapestry is one of the great playwright's most symbolic and lyrical works, exploring the insecurities of an aging architect, Halvard Solness. 


Solness is a man consumed by ambition who has reached the pinnacle at terrible expense to his wife. 


Ibsen meditates on grief, fame, sexual temptation, and the delicate common ground between genius and lunacy. 


As a charismatic womanizer, a lion isolated in his climb to the peak of his profession, he is slowly caged by guilt and obsessed with fears.


One day a young woman, Hilde Wangel, marches into his office, claims the kingdom he promised her when she was a 13-year-old girl, and goads him into feats of fatal daring. 


Although Ibsen’s play was inspired by his infatuation with a girl he met on holiday in the Tyrol, it also deals with larger, cosmic themes: the conflict between duty and desire, reason and imagination, and the constant invasion of our private lives by seemingly demonic forces.


HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906) is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. The acknowledged father of modern realistic drama, he accomplished the critical shift from verse to prose, and drastically altered Victorian drama's focus from light, superficial sentiment to serious, often tragic examinations of contemporary social issues. Peer Gynt, A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabler are among his most famous masterworks.