The Master Builder

Presentation

Solness is a great builder who erects his own fortune on the ashes of his wife’s family home, robbing her of any possible future happiness.

Solness is terrified by the young who come knocking at the door asking for the old to step aside. But young Hilde does not care about knocking, she decides to barge in with an erotic charge and explosive energy.

She has returned to lay claim to her realm as a Princess. That castle in the sky which the great builder promised her ten years prior.

Solness feeds off the life of the women who surround him but this one is going to be fatal and will accompany him, lovingly, to the edge of the precipice.

If Solness is a builder, Ibsen is a perfect architect capable of erecting a house with a perfectly bourgeois and ordinary appearance, inside the walls of which hide forgotten princesses, demons and magical assistants at the master’s service.

The underlying Judgement Day in Ibsen’s entire work finds its explicit final declaration in the moment when, at the apex of three constantly tense acts, we will be led to the final conviction. An inexorable sentence which Solness will be inflicting upon himself, without mercy.

Solness suffers from vertigo, he has already climbed to the summit of a tower in a fit of delirium of omnipotence, conquering the fear of the void to the point of personally addressing God, threatening to no longer build any churches for him. But after ten years the guilt towards his wife and the fear of losing his place to the younger generations will weaken him and when Hilde will lead him once again to the summit of one of his works, he will realize that all he has ever created as a man and as an artist is too frail to withstand the weight of lost happiness.