This modern dress, Spartan production of Ibsen’s 1892 play is a haunting oddity, a dream-like, trippy, chilling tale about the power of the mind and the cost of ambition.
Halvard Solness is a self-taught architect – or master builder as he would rather term himself – whose career was founded on a tragedy and has been fuelled by his own thirst for success at the expense of others. Now he feels threatened by the younger generation and haunted by the cost of his achievements. When the young Hilde Wangel suddenly appears in his life, she allows him to fully indulge in the questions that swirl in his mind.
Travis Preston’s production is played out on a stage that is covered in gravel and bare except for two minimalist chairs. A staircase on the back wall leads up into the ether. Costumes, though contemporary, are of muted colours, and Paul Pyant’s lighting is mostly dark and brooding, adding to the ominous feeling that seems to hang over the action.
The play hangs on the relationship between Solness, the hardened careerist, and Hilde, the strange woman who seems to be the soulmate and confidante he has been looking for all his life. With an emphasised physicality, Stephen Dillane and Gemma Arterton create a partnership that is funny and bizarre, understandable yet surreal. Throughout the play Ibsen makes us question who this woman is. Is she really the young girl who Solness encountered a decade earlier at a time when he was questioning his faith? Or is she is a figment of his imagination, conjured at a crucial moment when he is again questioning his place in the world? Childlike yet alluring, innocent but demanding, Arterton manages to underlay Hilde’s eccentricity with a chilling forthrightness. She is a siren enticing Solness towards danger.
The central duo are supported by strong performances from the rest of the cast, including Anastasia Hille as the duty-bound wife who life has trampled on, and Emma Hamilton as Solness’s secretary Kaja who is breathlessly entranced by her master. Anxious and awkward, she stumbles about the stage like Bambi, her high heels sticking in the gravel, as she courts the attention of her boss.
That relationship, too, turns out to have a strange, other-worldly quality. Is it real or has Solness wished it on himself as a device for keeping a younger colleague’s ambition at bay? Like much in Ibsen’s play it is a question that the playwright has intentionally left open to interpretation. If you want something enough, he says, can you make it come true?
CB