Then and Now Masterful

The Master Builder Starring James Naughton, Kristin Griffith

The Irish Repertory Theatre, New York

THE more a man wants, the less he gets. That sobering maxim is at the heart of The Master Builder, Henrik Ibsen's fresh as the day it was written play, in a translation by the celebrated Irish playwright Frank McGuinness that's now playing at The Irish Repertory Theatre in New York.

First performed in 1893, Ibsen's overtly symbolic work has lost none of its potency in the hundred years or so since its first performance in Berlin. But its themes have not achieved greater clarity over the course of time, either.

A symbolist drama in the loosest sense, The Master Builder is a fascinating mix of ideas in search of a play, which may explain some of its enduring allure to ambitious playwrights and directors.

McGuinness's translation, drafted in the Irish vernacular, moves at a clip and helps to anchor a lot of the action - but it's the play itself that often mystifies. Is The Master Builder a Victorian morality tale, or a Greek tragedy, or a modern version of the Faust myth, or is it a deeply Freudian examination of the psyche?

The answer is yes to all four and more besides. It's one of Ibsen's headiest later works, and in it he alternates wildly between ideas and action.

Halvard Solness, the show's anti-hero (played by screen heartthrob James Naughton) is a middle-aged architect who has clawed his way to the top of his profession through sheer determination and a single-minded focus on his job, but the process has hardened him, preventing him and his wife Aline (Kristin Griffith) from sharing a meaningful private life. Their marriage is a subsumed by their building company.

The play might have succeeded on its own terms if Ibsen had been content to leave it at that. But the restless Norwegian genius saw all manner of symbolic possibilities in his fairly straightforward premise and attached them all to the final work, weighing down his drama and his characters.

The terrible price of overweening ambition is symbolized in the sickly figure of his elderly assistant, Knut Brovik (Herb Foster), a former employer that Solness has mercilessly stepped on to reach the top. Solness is utterly terrified of being eclipsed by a younger generation of architects, and so he refuses to allow Brovik's son to design original houses or to leave the firm and strike out on his own.

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Nster.com