About the Play:

The Master Builder is a full-length drama by Henrik Ibsen. An aging architect is haunted by memories and fears until a figure from his past returns.

The most gripping of Ibsen's later, brooding self-portraits, The Master Builder bursts forth with the religious, mystical, and poetic strains in the playwright's nature. Here they are contained within a domestic but strongly symbolic framework: Solness, architect and messianic hero, has been pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and is now painfully labouring to drag himself up again. His development as a builder, his fascination with a young and beautiful woman, his fear of eclipse by a younger generation of talent — all are highly charges autobiographical reflections.

In this fresh translation by Nicholas Rudall, the language of The Master Builder is no longer archaic or Victorian, and the play becomes eminently accessible for contemporary audiences.

Cast: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"It is a great cathedral of a play, with dark, mystical strains which boom like the chords of an organ. Since Ibsen is once again concerned with a powerful central hero who wills his fate, rather than a victim of circumstantial process, the work has a feeling of loftiness and grandeur." — Robert Brustein

About the Playwright:

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is the second most widely produced dramatist in the world, eclipsed only by Shakespeare. He is revered in Norway as its most famous author and a national symbol, even though he spent much of his life abroad in Italy and Germany. He was largely responsible for the rise of realism in the theatre. In works that possess revelatory power Ibsen challenged his audiences to question conventional morality and social conditions. Often controversial, his works were deeply unsettling to many of his Victorian contemporaries. He is now widely regarded as the "father of modern drama" and one of the greatest dramatists who ever lived.

D. Nicholas Rudall (1940-2018) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has directed many classical works at the Court Theatre, of which he is the founding director. His teaching focused on tragedy and the ancient theater, Aristophanes, and Propertius.