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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 Psychopathological and Unconscious. But visions of a more transcendent past, present and future ferment the fertile and subversive imaginations of the audacious pair. An action in which 'youth' from Lysanger ('lys' = light) invades the retreat of an aging figure named after the sun (Sol-ness), at the time of the autumnal equinox (September 19th) and, the next evening get that figure to ascend and fall against a sun-streaked sky, already is revealing less a sexually pathologial and more a mythopoetic, archetypal supertext. It is the dimensions of this wider-ranging supertext that a conscientious interpreter and a boldly imaginative theatre would need to explore.

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. This should encourage us to extend the dimensions of the play's action: the diurnal and seasonal rhythms of the sun's rising and setting; the biological and 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 Parsifal does to Amfortas), to take his leave splendidly, like a superb setting of the sun. We might see the play, then, linking to other great expiatory actions; those of the old Oedipus or Lear or Faust. The texture of the play has the glancing, shifting quality of shot silk as the action moves through many dimensions of reality at the same time, to its unnervingly ambiguous climax.