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The Master Builder

The acton of The Master Builder, which takes place in the fall, seems both shocking and extraordinarily simple: a young woman enters the household of a successful architect with the claim that, ten years to the day, he once made love to her when she was 12-13 year old, promising her a 'kingdom' on this very date. A strictly literalist interpretation of the play might haul in (indeed has done so!) a rich catch for Freudian trawlers of the oceanic regions of the Unconscious and Psychopathological. But the audacious pair, Hilda ande Solness, are animated by more fertile and subversive visions of a transcendent past, present and future . An action in which 'youth' from Lysanger ('lys' = light) invades the retreat of an aging architect named after the sun (Sol-ness), at the time of the autumnal equinox (September 19th) and, the next evening gets that figure to ascend and fall against a sun-streaked sky, already is revealing more a mythopoetic, archetypal supertext than a pathological one.  The imaginative  dimensions of this wider-ranging supertext call for exploratiion by conscientious interpretions and boldly imaginative theatrical productions.

In the theatre we would note the scenic progression of increasing light and spatial freedom from Act One's windowless space of unhappy servitude, to the light-filled, bay-windowed room of Act Two, to the final open air and splendid sunset of Act Three. The dimensions of the play's action extend to the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of the sun's rising and setting; the biological contrast between generations, old and young; the wasteland theme of energies atrophied and sickly where, in a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty legend, the young 'princess' enters the enchanted realm, frees the young lovers, (Ragnar and Kaja) while releasing the old hero from his torment, (as Waqgner's Parsifal releases Amfortas), to take his leave splendidly, like a superb setting of the sun. The play links to other great expiatory actions; those of the old Oedipus or Prospero or Faust. The play's action moves through many dimensions of reality at the same time, to its ambiguous climax.