My Master Builder

The Crack of Light in the Darkened Room 

Director Michael Grandage and playwright Lila Raicek discuss how Ibsen, architects and the contradictory desires of the human heart inform My Master Builder. 

Michael Grandage: When you and I first started discussing My Master Builder, you told me you had a very personal story to tell and that during the process of writing it, you found a relationship with Ibsen’s The Master Builder. Is that a good way of describing the connection between these two plays?  

Lila Raicek: Yes, My Master Builder is a layered triptych, in a sense, of the original, the personal and the fictional. In the not-so-distant past, I was invited to a dinner party in the Hamptons, hosted by an eminent British couple. The psychosexual warfare that unfolded that night piqued my interest as a playwright because I realised I was not only invited as a guest, but also as a pawn in their marital game. 

I came away from that night burning to write a play about a vulnerable marriage shattered by the arrival of a young woman, with whom they share an intimate history. While that story was consuming my subconscious, I found myself reading a book called Munch’s Ibsen, about the relationship between artist and playwright, for a different play. I was struck by a quote addressing Ibsen’s own ill-fated affair 

with a younger woman, which inspired The Master Builder: “She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her – for my play.” As I started to entrench myself in the new play, I had a revelatory creative moment where I realised Ibsen’s play was, in a way, 

the scaffolding for my own and, within itself, had such startling contemporary resonance. 

MG: But it hasn’t ended up being ‘a version’ or ‘an adaptation’ or ‘a translation’ of The Master Builder. It feels more like a ‘conversation’ with the original. 

LR: True. I ended up writing a new play that, I hope, explores the contradictions of love and the interplay between desire and betrayal through a modern, female lens. Yet it still borrows some thematic elements from the Ibsen. He had a masterful 

ability to conjure the spectre of the past, and the impulse to light a bomb under it. I was also captivated by the triangulation of the love story but, unusually for Ibsen, found his female characters in The Master Builder problematically one-dimensional. This presented an opportunity to be in dialogue with the past while creating a new narrative.   

MG: And yet it’s also interesting that you decided to create a play on the original title.   

LR: The title is indeed a nod to the last line of the original play. The possessive “my” of My Master Builder should be ambiguous, begging the question as to whose play it is; each character can be seen as the architect and casualty of their own fate. Additionally, the play is about how love can be used as a weapon of dominance – and the loaded “master” connotes these shifting power dynamics. 

MG: The biggest shift, for those who do know the Ibsen, is that you’ve taken the character of the wife, who plays a minor supporting role in the original, and very much made her a leading character. 

LR: Ibsen creates an autobiographic portrait of himself but sweeps his wife into the background as a long-suffering, grieving matron. Similarly Hilda, in the original, is portrayed as a binary object of seduction and destruction, a mythic creature of the woods. In this sense, I felt challenged to create two complex female characters who hold equal weight to Henry. Elena and Hilde are at different junctures of life, yet both find themselves grappling with the painful realities of womanhood.    

MG: What, in turn, do you think that has done to Henry in our play? 

LR: I think it makes him a more sympathetic and dynamic character. It is interesting how the original anticipates the idea of the architect in the 20th century, and the figure of the ‘starchitect’ – it intersects with what we call ‘toxic masculinity.’ Henry, our tragic hero, is not without flaws, but by balancing him out with two powerful women who have voices of their own, we deepen the layers of his emotional arc. 

MG: There’s a real gift, isn’t there, to having a central character who is an architect? 

LR: A central theme to the play is the blurred and porous boundary between fantasy and reality, and I think that stems from Henry being an architect. He has the curse of being able to translate the invisible and the impossible into ‘bricks and mortar’ realness. The same slippery boundary is also inherent in the ideas of love in the play, how our romantic illusions are often in conflict with the incursions of reality.  

I started doing a deep dive into architects while writing the play, and found an illuminating quote from the architect Louis Kahn: “Even a room that must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.” The duality that Kahn captures in his philosophy of architecture also captures the dualities Henry is holding in his heart, only he cannot reconcile the light and the dark; the transparency and the opaqueness or the openness and the enclosure. Architects are known to be tormented by these inner conflicts but, in a sense, we’re all struggling to reckon with these incongruent truths within ourselves. 

MG: Why did you decide to stay authentic to your experience and set your play in the Hamptons in America, with a British couple at the centre of it?   

LR: On a dramatic level, the setting lends itself seamlessly to a play. The Hamptons are often painted with a very glamourous brush, which is undeniable. Yet what fascinates me is the poeticness of the terrain which feels very Ibsen. The dunes, the seascape, the expanse of untouched land, it all has a very dreamy texture. The mythical light which inspired abstract expressionists such as de Kooning, Pollock, Frankenthaler. And within that, you have the classic theatricality of being trapped in a country house where everyone is forced to spend the night together.  

I’m interested in mapping the unchartered territory of a physical and psychological landscape we think familiar to us. The 19th-century Old Whaler’s Church in the Hamptons became a character in the play – that was a source of inspiration in terms of thinking about how memory informs a sense of space. Henry is obsessed with preserving and reconstructing the memory of the past through his buildings, particularly spaces that are haunted by the wreckage of trauma and loss; yet he has trouble confronting the grief in his own past.   

MG: Right back at the start, what attracted me to working on this play was that, although you’ve found a way of being in conversation with the past, we’re presenting a story in 2025 that has very specific things it wants to tell. 

LR: We’re living though a moment of charged sexual politics and the characters in our play are not immune to its personal and public implications. As the connection is reignited between Henry and Hilde, it raises provocative questions about desire in the face of a power imbalance. Yet I wanted to probe this sensitive subject, without providing answers. Our characters act out of both self-preservation and self-destruction which I think, as humans, we often do. 

MG: One thing we seem to agree on is how ambiguity has been lost in a cultural moment where we seek definitions and not questions. Life, ambiguity, nuance, subtlety… we’ve become much more binary on many things. What’s great about your writing is that it returns us to a tradition of theatre based on an understanding of how ambiguity can actually be a source of strength. 

LR: Yes. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit it, but I’m drawn to the dark edges of our hearts, and theatre should provoke us to explore this murky space! Human behaviour is often irreconcilable and, to quote the play, so is the agony and ecstasy of love.