Byggmeister Solness by Henrik Ibsen (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Byggmeister Solness by Henrik Ibsen
• Andrew Friedman

BYGGMEISTER SOLNESS. By Henrik Ibsen. Created by Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, with music by Trond Reinholdtsen. Det Norske Teatret, Oslo. September 12 and 14, 2023.

The words “Byggmeister Angst” flashed in neon above the stage throughout Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s eight-and-a-half-hour performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Byggmeister Solness (The Master Builder, 1892). The production was the ninth installment of the duo’s Ibsen-Saga (2006-), a self-proclaimed six-hundred-year project to stage Ibsen’s œuvre as interconnected performances unified by a singular aesthetic. The two performances of Byggmeister Solness I attended uncharacteristically abandoned the Saga’s use of artistic ambition as a pretext to challenge institutional limits. Now on their second production of a five-year residency at Oslo’s Det Norske Teatret, Vinge and Müller officially reside in the resource-rich belly of the institutional beast. Emerging from Oslo’s free scene—and the relatively permissive environs of Berlin—the Saga’s oppositional aesthetics now share a season with a major theatre’s marquee production of the Disney musical Frost. Rather than stage a grand Ibsenian conflict, Vinge and Müller dramatized their angsty acquiescence to the institution hosting them by transforming The Master Builder into a musical about safety.

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Ragnar and the builders sing the opening overture in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)

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Solness oversees his builders in Byggmeister Solness. (Photo: Ole Herman Andersen.)

The production retained the Saga’s hallmark aesthetics and associative dramaturgy. Directed by Vinge, designed by Müller, and composed by Trond Reinholdtsen (all of whom performed in the piece as well), the production combined cartoon-ish artificiality (hand-painted scenography and masked performers gesturing to prerecorded text and sound effects) and extreme reality (destruction, excreta, and stunts). Solness was an old vampiric god in a diaper; his gory crimes and the lives of his victims were presented in stage action and in live and prerecorded films. Solness drank the blood of his apprentice Ragnar Brovik and beat Old Brovik to a pulp, used his assistant Kaja as a canvas for his “artistic juice” (ejaculate), sexually abused the prepubescent Hilda Wangel in spectacles evoking coprophilia and suicide, and, with the help of Dr. Herdel, sedated his wife Aline, who mourned their deceased daughters. These brutalities were filtered through the Saga’s associative dramaturgy, which interwove Ibsen’s text with complementary narratives from film, performance art, and the theatrical and operatic canons. The disenchanted Ragnar doubled as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver (1976), Aline as the scorned wife Louise Schumacher from Network (1976), Solness as the pitiless banker Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987), and Hilda as a Disney princess in a white dress and tiara. Using a microphone, Vinge directed each night’s singular performance in real time from the stage, booth, and auditorium while conversing with or criticizing audiences and technicians. Ibsen’s work was, as always, distilled to an overarching ethos that governs the Saga’s limit-testing theatre: the artist’s desire for self-realization within an oppressive society.

What Byggmeister Solness tested was Vinge and Müller’s capacity to be institutional. Rather than rebel like Ibsenian ideologues, they created a production that flaunted its obedience, exposing restrictions through conspicuous compliance. The show shockingly started and ended at its advertised time (a first!), because in Norway, as Vinge satirically announced, “the actors have to be in bed by 10:30 p.m.” Most impactful were the production’s demonstrations of safety protocols that reframed the Saga’s typically dangerous stunts as acts of risk management. Midway through the show, Aline was set on fire. But first, we watched the performer nonchalantly apply flame-retardant gel to her skin while a fireman wrapped her in fireproof clothes, readied extinguishers and a fire blanket, and then wiped accelerant on her body. Once ignited, Aline flailed to ear-splitting screams, briefly banishing the procedural prelude from my mind—and likely others’ as well. After extinguishing the flames, however, the performer smirked at the audience...