Act 1

The Master Builder in question is Halvard Solness. For years he worked for Knut Brovik but then the tables were turned, Brovik went bankrupt while Solness struck out on his own and established his own thriving business, hiring Brovik, and his son Ragnar, to come and work for him. So Solness is now a vigorous successful man of 40 or so while Brovik is now old and ill and bitter. The play opens with Knut and Ragnar working in Solness’s office and grumblingly revealing all this backstory. Off to one side works pretty young Kaja Fosli, who is Knut’s niece and engaged to Ragnar.

The play opens with Solness returning to the office and confronting Knut who is unhappy. In particular he wants to see his son, Ragnar, get a commission of his own and prove his worth as an architect while Solness is reluctant to let him leave. The crux of the argument is that a young couple have come to Solness asking him to build them a home. Solness in front of Knut and Ragnar dismisses the commission but when Knut then asks if his son can take it up, and mentions that Ragnar has already shown the couple some sketches, Solness reverses his position and says Ragnar can’t do it, he’ll do it.

In the middle of the argument Solness broaches the theme which is to become central to the play, namely his anxiety that a new, younger generation is knocking on the door. Solness worries that he will be forced to get out of the way, make way for younger men (p.272).

Kaja

Back in the main office Knut says he feels ill so Ragnar helps his ailing dad go home. Left by themselves Solness and Kaja reveal that they are in love. Or more precisely, young Kaja is absolutely besotted with the older man. Through slips in his dialogue, Ibsen conveys the sense that Solness is going along with her infatuation, playing up to it (‘I can’t do without you’), but chiefly because he wants Ragnar to stay in his office, and where Kaja is, there Ragnar (her official fiancé) will remain (p.276).

Like most older literature, it’s impossible to imagine modern people behaving like this. The manipulation, yes, but the idea that Ragnar and Kaja have been engaged for five years and Ragnar hasn’t noticed that his beloved is besotted with another man – and that other man is his boss – is implausible.

Anyway, three more characters have to be introduced before we have the full set and the game can begin. First to enter is Solness’s wife, a faded beauty, a tired woman named Aline. We quickly realise that she is alert to whatever’s going on between her husband and his pretty secretary, and that – after she’s popped into the room briefly to say that Dr Herder has called round then leaves – we learn that Kaja, with that woman’s sense, knows that Aline knows and is tortured with anxiety and shame. Solness tries to reassure her and packs her off home.

Dr Herder

Dr Herder is introduced and the women leave the two men alone. In a tactful way Herder tells Solness his wife suspects he’s having an affair and asks if she is justified. Solness replies that his wife’s jealousy is not unjustified but not in the way she thinks. Yes Solness is playing up to Kaja but (our suspicions are confirmed) he’s only doing so to keep Ragnar in his practice, for the young man is extremely talented and useful.

But Solness goes beyond this simple piece of manipulation to tell the doctor something more. When Kaja first presented herself at the practice wanting something or other, as soon as she explained her relationship with Ragnar, Solness saw his opportunity and wished very strongly that she would apply for a job. But he didn’t say it out loud, just wished hard. The funny thing is that she turned up the next morning ready to start work as if he’d offered her the job and yet he never had. Solness himself is puzzled. It’s as if his unspoken wishes made it happen…

Dr Herder is a rational soul and thinks all this is poppycock. Returning to the main point he asks Solness why he hasn’t explained all this to his wife. Once it was explained she’d understand. And again, Solness gives an unexpectedly perverse or spiritual answer. He doesn’t explain the real situation to his wife because he enjoys her being suspicious and jealous of him. He enjoys ‘the mortification of letting Aline do him an injustice’ (p.282).

Again the doctor doesn’t understand him but Solness sweeps on, anyway, to declare that the real problem isn’t that his wife thinks he’s unfaithful, it’s that she thinks he’s mad. And sometimes Solness agrees. Everyone (including the doctor) thinks he’s rich and successful and yet inside he’s consumed with anxiety amounting to fear. he is terrified of being swept away in the deluge of the rising generation.

SOLNESS: The turn is coming. I sense it. I can feel it getting nearer. Somebody or other is going to demand: Make way for me! And then all the others will come storming up, threatening and shouting: Get out of the way! Get out of the way! Yes, just you watch, doctor! One of these days youth is going to come here beating on the door… (p.285)

Hilde

At the height of this slightly unhinged soliloquy there’s a knock on the door and the final character enters, Hilde Wangel. She’s dressed in hiking clothes and 23 and full of life and confidence. Herder remembers that he and Solness met her amid a group of hiking ladies earlier in the summer. Now she’s come back to town on her own, with nothing but the clothes she’s standing in and a hiking pack. Rather presumptuously she asks if she can stay the night and Solness, impressed by her forthrightness, says yes and calls his wife to fix up one of the spare rooms (in fact they have three unused nursery rooms) for her.

The doctor leaves Hilde and Solness alone. First she captivates him with her insouciance – she doesn’t have any money or any plans but laughs at his offer that she come and work for him (‘not likely!’). But then she reminds him that ten years earlier, when he was in his 30s and she was just 13, he had supervised the repair of the church tower in her home town of Lysanger. Once it was completed they held a ceremony, the whole town turned out in formal dress for speeches and so on, Hilde and the other schoolgirls were wearing white dresses, and at the peak Solness climbed to the top of the scaffolding and placed a wreath on the weathercock.

Then there was a big dinner at the town club and then Solness was invited round to Hilde’s father’s house for drinks. And how when he arrived she was the only one in the reception room. And now, she reminds him, he was very kind and said that she looked like a little princess, and how she said your princess, and how Solness played along and said, yes, in ten years time he would return and sweep her off to some exciting foreign land like Spain, carry her off like a troll and make her his princess. And then, Solness claims to have completely forgotten but Hilde now reminds him, that he kissed her. Took her in his arms and bent her backwards and kissed her, several times.

At first Solness angrily denies it while Hilde stands sullenly still and silent but then, in a strange way, he talks himself into believing it, and then asserting it. And what happened next…? Nothing happened next. All the other guests came rushing into the room and that was that, Hilde says grumpily.

But now she reminds him of something else he’s forgotten. The date all this happened was 19 September and today is 19 September. It’s exactly ten years to the day since he made his promise to return and carry her off to an exotic land (p.295). Playfully she raps the table and says, Time’s up! She’s here and she expects to be carried away to a magic kingdom!

A little more realistically she asks whether he’s built any more church towers recently and when he replies no, mostly people’s homes, she asks surely everyone should have towers on their houses and Solness admits that he’s most recently building a house for himself and, yes, it is going to have a tower, and they both rhapsodise for a moment about towers stretching up to the skies.

And we realise we’re not in an exactly realistic kind of play or fiction but in something which has crossed over, somehow, into a fairy tale.

And now, unrealistically, having established this memory-fairy bond between them, Solness shares with Hilde the deep fear he also shared with the doctor, his fear about Youth coming rampaging in and sweeping him away (p.299). This he explains, is why he’s locked himself away and barred the door (he must mean metaphorically, spiritually, because we’ve seen him freely coming and going).

All this is interrupted by first the doctor then Solness’s wife, Aline, entering to say she’s fixed up one of the bedrooms. Both the doctor and Aline are surprised at how intimate Solness and Hilde have become in their absence, signalled by the fact that Solness refers to her as the familiar Hilde, not the formal Miss Wangel which he ought to use seeing as they’ve only met half an hour ago.

But Solness explains to both that he met and knew her a few years ago. ‘Did you now?’ says Aline, raising her eyebrows. It’s clear that she sees Hilde as the latest in a succession of young women attracted to her husband. But Hilde in their last moments alone had asked Solness if she could find some use for her (presumably in his business) and when Solness enthusiastically replied Yes, she clapped her hands with delight. Some kind of pact or agreement has been signed between the anxious middle-aged man and this vivacious symbol of youth.

Act 2

Solness and Alvine alone together in the family home, revealing – no surprise – that they are both bitterly unhappy. We learned in an aside in Act 1 that her parents’ family home burned down 13 or so years ago and this turns out to have devastated Aline. I also think (it’s very elliptical) that either they had children who died young or were unable to have children, either way something about children is a sore point between them. With the result that they live in a house full of secrets and repressed unhappiness (‘The emptiness is dreadful.’)

Solness tries to persuade her that everything will be better once they move into the new house but Aline’s not having it. Nothing will change.

ALINE: Build as much as you will, Halvard – you can never build another home for me! (p.303)

In quick succession Solness reveals two things: he keeps harping on about being mad; but deeper than that, he is oppressed by a crushing sense of guilt towards Aline, even though he’s never knowingly done her any wrong.

Hilde

Into this miserable conversation walks Hilde who stayed last night. Aline is happy to break off the conversation in order to offer to go and buy for Hilde bits and bobs she’ll need. There’s just enough of an exchange between them for Aline to make it quite clear she’s sceptical about Solness’s claim that Hilde is a friend from way (back), using the same dry tone she uses when addressing Kaja. Plainly she thinks he likes to surround himself with adoring young women.

Left alone Hilde and Solness’s conversation is a strange mix of artless chat and intense confession. Hilde looks over the plans recently made by Ragnar which Solness has been reviewing but this leads into her intense declaration that only he, the Master Builder, should be allowed to build anything and, unexpectedly, Solness agrees and admits this is an opinion he has secretly nurtured.

To change the subject he points out the building in scaffolding across the way and Hilde notes the big tower. That’s the new house he’s built for them. And now he’s in confessional mode he tell Hilde (and the audience) the story of his children. Aline bore twin boys. But they were only three weeks old when the house burned down. Nobody was hurt in the fire but the shock and the cold air when she was rescued from the burning house gave Aline a fever. But she insisted on carrying on breast feeding the babies because it was her duty. And so she gave them the fever and they died…

And he points out to her the terrible paradox that, although the fire was the making of him – it allowed him to design and new buildings on the large plot of land freed up by the destruction of the old house and these homes made his reputation – the paradox is that his entire career is built on creating safe, secure homes for families when he, himself, can never again have a family, will never have children, will never know a child’s love.

And he is tortured by an immense guilt, the sense that the more successful he is an architect, the more he builds lovely homes for families, the more he and those around him, somehow, have to pay a price, the terrible thought:

SOLNESS: That all this I somehow have to make up for. Pay for. Not in money, but in human happiness. And not with my own happiness alone but with other people’s too. Don’t you see that, Hilde? That’s the price my status as an artist has cost me — and others. And every single day I have to stand by and watch this price being paid for me anew. Over and over again — endlessly! (p.316)

By now we can see why Solness has repeatedly described himself as mad; this terrible anxiety and guilt are a form of mental illness. And not only that, but he feels guilty that the loss of the boys deprived Aline if her vocation, which was to raise children.

Ragnar

All this angst is interrupted by Ragnar knocking and entering to tell Solness that his father, Knut, is very ill. Ragnar asks him if he can take the message back to his Dad that Solness rates and compliments his drawings. But Solness obstinately refuses to praise them and gets cross when Ragnar persists. Why doesn’t Solness just praise them and tell Ragnar to take the praise to his dying Father? Because he is blocked and obstinate.

Ragnar reluctantly leaves and Hilde tells Solness that was mean and cruel. Their conversation resumes its strange mood. Solness shares a secret, a kind of confession, he says the whole thing came down to a crack in one of the chimneys. He noticed it and meant to do something about it for ages but something held him back. Then he goes into a kind of visionary state to explain that he saw his house being burned down, he imagined it would happen one cold day while he and Aline were out for a ride and the others had banked up the fires ready for their return. He describes it so vividly that Hilde (and the audience) are led to believe this is the route of his guilt, that the fire which led to the death of his children and the ruin of his wife was somehow his fault.

And yet at the last minute he switches tack and says it wasn’t that at all. Turns out the fire started in a cupboard somewhere else, was in no way caused by the leak he didn’t fix. And yet so intensely had he wished for the fire that he is haunted by a sense of guilt he can’t assuage.

But he still hasn’t finished. He goes on to explain his conviction that in order to achieve anything a man needs helpers and servants and, moreover, they must come to him of their own volition. This is what he was trying to explain to Dr Herder who didn’t understand at all but Hilde does understand. She tells him that she felt some strange force or compulsion to come and see him (p.323). Yes, says Solness, we both have the troll inside us.

Floating just above the realm of realism, in the realm of poetic drama, Solness tells Hilde she is like a bird of the forest and she takes the metaphor and sees herself as a powerful bird of prey. Then he switches the image and says, no, she is like the dawn, she is the quality of Youth to which he is endlessly drawn (p.325).

This leads back to the drawings by Ragnar on the table and Solness confesses some more. He admits that Ragnar is a very talented architect and that, given half a chance, he will do to Solness what Solness did to h is father, namely smash him and leave him in the dust. Nonetheless, Hilde makes him come over and sit at the desk with the drawings on and insists that they write some nice comments for Ragnar to show his dying father.

But Solness can’t concentrate and asks Hilde why, if she was obsessed with him she never wrote to him. And why she never visited sooner. And what does she want from him? And she replies, simply, she wants the kingdom which he promised her.

Aline

Mrs Solness enters with various parcels saying she’s done the shopping for Hilde, who thanks her. but she asks her to call in Kaja from the office. Kaja enters very young and intimidated. Hilde gives her Ragnar’s architect’s drawings with Solness’s comments scribbled on them and tells her to run back to Ragnar’s house and give them to him to show his father in his dying hours…

But Kaja’s joy is brutally cut short, when in front of his wife and Hilde, Solness also tells Kaja to tell the Broviks that he has no further use for them, and that goes for her too. She is appalled. He has just fired all three of them. She creeps timidly out. Aline reprimands her husband for being so brutal but goes on, with her usual pointed manner, to say Solness will probably be able to replace her pretty easily…looking at Hilde.

Hilde is not intimidated and larkily says she’d be no use behind a desk, that’s not her style. Solness tells his wife to hurry up and pack their things ready to move into the new house. This very evening they’ll have the topping-off ceremony. And Hilde butts in to ask whether Solness will climb to the top of the tower to place a wreath at the top like he did with the church in her home town. Solness is inspired by the vision and wants to but Aline is horrified and reminds him he gets terrible vertigo, he can’t even bear to go out onto their first floor balcony, he gets dizzy, it would be an accident waiting to happen.

But so bewitched is Solness by Hilde that he says he’ll do it, regardless, anything for his Princess Hilde.

And so on to Act 3 with the audience totally expecting Solness to climb the tower and fall to his death. Will he, won’t he?

Act 3

The third and final act is set outside, on a verandah of their current home but with a view over to the new one, partly swathed in scaffolding. Aline is sunning herself. Hilde comes up onto the verandah bearing flowers from the garden. They get chatting with Hilde obviously buttering Aline up and gaining her confidence enough to talk about the famous fire which burned her family home. She makes the point that it’s the little things whose loss hurts the most, like the nine dollies she’d kept since her childhood.

Enter Dr Herdal, paying a visit. With the three of them there Hilde asks if he’ll be around that evening to watch Solness climb the tower, first the doctor’s heard of it. This triggers panic fear in Aline who begs Hilde to talk her husband out of it. Impulsively Hilde throws her arms round Aline’s neck in the way nobody now does (did they ever or is this a convention from a certain era?) Aline tells the doctor she’d like to talk to him about her husband and they exit.

Followed promptly by Solness entering. Hilde tells him point blank that she wants to leave. She talks openly about them having an affair which hadn’t been explicit before. She says it’s one thing taking the man from someone you don’t know but she’s come to know and like Mrs Solness (in the matter of about 2 days!) and so, no, can’t have an affair with him and wants to leave.

Surprisingly (or maybe not, given Ibsen’s track record of hysterical characters telling each other they can’t live without the other) Solness is devastated: ‘What will happen to me after you’re gone? What will I have left to live for?’ He says Aline is dead inside ‘And here I am, chained alive to this dead woman’ (p.338)

Hilde suddenly outbursts that this life is so stupid, their not daring to reach out and lay hands upon happiness just because someone is standing in the way (i.e. Mrs Solness). But just as quickly they start joking around. Hilde says again that she is like a great forest bird, and (Solness adds) swooping down on her prey, and then Hilde declares she knows what he will build next, it will be a castle! He promised her a kingdom and all kingdoms have castles, don’t they? And they push on further into this fantasy, she telling him he’ll build her the biggest tallest mightiest castle ever, high on a hill and with a ginormous tower. Caught up in her vision, Solness asks for more and she says he will go further, her Master Builder will build her castles in the air.

Ragnar

Enter Ragnar to puncture this vision. He’s brought the wreath, the workmen gave it to him to bring over. Solness says he’ll take charge of the wreath prompting Ragnar to mockingly ask whether he is going to climb to the top of the building. Angrily Solness tells him to go home to tend his father. Too late for that, Ragnar replies, he’s had a stroke and is unconscious. Kaja is tending him. Solness tells him, nonetheless, to push off and go be with his father, and exits, walking off the balcony and over to the other building, holding the wreath.

This gives Ragnar an opportunity to tell Hilde how bitterly angry he is with Solness, for ruining his father’s life, for holding him back and all of this just to…Hilde prompts him … just to be close to Kaja. Hilde’s suspicions that Solness was in a relationship with Kaja are confirmed but she refuses to believe it. Ragnar says Kaja has just recently admitted it, that the Master Builder owns her body and soul, that he controls her thoughts, that she can never be separated from him.

Hilde refuses to believe it and now tells Ragnar her interpretation, which is that Solness only kept Kaja on because doing so kept Ragnar tied to him, stuck in his office. Ragnar admits that has a certain logic and reveals just how much Solness is afraid of him. Hilde demurs. Ragnar says she doesn’t realise yet that the Master Builder’s entire character is based on fear.

Hilde demurs and says her Master Builder is fearless, and repeats her girlhood memory of watching him climb up the tower, brave and fearless. Yes, but that’s the one and only time he ever did it, Ragnar ripostes, he’ll never do it again…

Aline

Enter Aline who asks where Solness is and when the others tell her he’s gone off with the wreath she has a panic attack. She begs Ragnar to go and fetch him back, tell him they have important visitors and so Ragnar trots off.

At which point enter the doctor to tell her that she actually does have some visitors come to see her and also to ask after Solness. Aline and Hilde have a brief exchange wondering whether Solness actually is mad as he keeps telling everyone. Aline and the doctor exit and Solness reappears.

It’s just Solness and Hilde and he confesses something to her (something more, on top of all the other confessions the play’s been full of). This is that when the fire burned down the old house and led to the death of his children, he thought God was calling him to become a master of his craft, to deprive him of all distractions so he could dedicate his life to building churches to His glory.

But then he, Solness, did something impossible. A man terrified of heights and overcome by vertigo, he nonetheless managed to climb to the top of the church tower he’d built (as seen by Hilde, as described half a dozen times already) and when he was up there, he had a word with God. He told God that he intended to be free, to do as he pleased, that never again would he build churches for God but homes for people (p.349). Defiance! Resolution!

But…but then…but now he thinks it was all for nothing. The people he built for didn’t really value their homes, he doesn’t value his achievement. So will he give up building altogether? No, there is one more thing he plans to build and he revisits what they were talking about earlier – castles in the air and tells her he can only do it with her.

Not with anyone else, she asks waspishly. Not with a certain Kaja. Solness is annoyed and, instead of flat out denying it, or explaining he only buttered up Kaja to keep Ragnar, foolishly he makes it a point of principle. He says Hilde must just trust him on this, she must believe in him. She replies she’ll believe in him when she sees him at the top of the tower.

And so Ibsen has manipulated his material round to make this climbing-of-the-tower become a great test his young would-be lover forces Solness to carry out. The tower has become a symbol within the play, symbolising Solness’s determination and something to do with his commitment to Hilde and starting a new life. But towers are also a very ancient symbol, freighted with numerous meanings to do with height and power and achievement, not forgetting the close to God element Solness made explicit in his colloquy with the Creator.

Solness pledges that he will not only climb to the top of the tower but, once there, he will have another conversation with God and this time he will assert his totalm freedom and independence:

SOLNESS: I shall say to him: Hear me, Great and Mighty Lord! Judge me as you will. But henceforth I shall build one thing only, quite the loveliest thing in the whole world…
HILDE: Yes…yes…yes!
SOLNESS: …Build it together with the princess I love…
HILDE: Yes, tell Him that! Tell Him that!
SOLNESS: Yes. And then I shall say to Him: And now I go down to take her in my arms and kiss her…
HILDE:…Many times! Say that!

Long story short: Solness dies. There’s a grand build-up, all the other characters arrive on the balcony (Mrs Solness, Hilde, Ragnar, Dr Heldar) plus some miscellaneous ladies while the set is arranged in such a way that we can see some of the crowd gathering in front of the house.

Mrs Solness is terrified and tells Solness not to do it but he reassures her that he’s just going down among his workmen. There’s an exchange between Ragnar and Hilde where he gives full vent to his frustration. Mrs Solness said how pleased she was that so many of her husband’s old apprentices had turned out to watch, but Ragnar explains it’s because Solness kept them all down, controlled them, cramped their careers, and so they all want to see him fail.

Although lots of other people ooh and aah, the core of the scene is the effect on Hilde. She watches, as in a trance, in a vision, her Master Builder clambers his way to the top of the scaffold where he does, indeed, place the wreath. And then there’s a pause which, as she explains to Ragnar, is Solness talking to God. At last, at last, she sees him ‘great and free‘. She hears a song in the air.

Then they all see Solness plummet to his death amid a wreck of scaffold and planking. But even after someone’s shouted up from the crowd that he’s definitely dead, Hilde still hears and sees the afterwaves of her vision.

HILDE: [with a kind of quiet, bewildered triumph]: But he got right to the top. And I heard harps in the air. [Waves the shawl upwards and shouts with a wild intensity.] My…my…master builder! (p.355)

Comments

Old literature is strange, that’s why I like it. It follows the rules of genres we no longer know, is influenced by the works of colleagues and contemporaries who we’ve forgotten, but most importantly, shows people behaving (we think) according to the social conventions and values of their day, many of which are so remote from us as to come from another planet. The text, the plot, the dialogue veer in and out of comprehension like someone looking through a microscope and fiddling with the focus. Sometimes it’s small details of social convention or behaviour which we find odd but often it’s major plot developments and sometimes the entire conception.

So my response to all the Ibsen plays has been very varied, thrilled, appalled, galvanised, puzzled, disappointed.

To start with the disappointment, it’s striking that three of these four plays end with the dramatic death (or mental collapse) of the protagonist: I associate this kind of melodrama with Chekhov and not in a good way.

Critics refer to the symbolism of the plays. Having just written a note about symbolism I don’t think this is quite the right concept; it’s more that the plays start with strictly plausible realism but then slowly transcend it in order to show us the characters’ psyches; and that these psyches are complex and over-wrought.

But reading these seven Ibsen plays I found the power of the conception, and the power of the conception of the central characters, steamrollers through doubts about verisimilitude, overwhelms quibbles about plausibility. They appear realistic in every detail and yet Ibsen’s plays feel like they take you to the heart of the burning furnace of human nature.

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Related links

• The Master Builder online

Ibsen reviews

• The Doll’s House (1879)
• Ghosts (1881)
• An Enemy of the People (1882)
• The Wild Duck (1884)
• Rosmersholm (1886)
• Hedda Gabler (1890)
• The Master Builder (1892)

Drama reviews

• Play reviews