Ibsen

A scene from Henrik Ibsen's play The Master Builder.

Ibsen is one of my favorite playwrights, for his uncanny ability to make characters "live" on stage.

Theatre critic, Hilton Als, says the following of The Master Builder, staged currently at the BAM's Harvey Theatre:

Power corrupts, but it can also bore. Like compulsive seducers, the unduly ambitious are the heroes of their own narratives, dogged, ruthless, and full of self-regard. Halvard Solness, the title character of Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play “The Master Builder,” is a portrait of something, but of what? To say simply that the aging, legendary, but still competitive architect embodies cold determination and raging avarice is to ignore the ways in which Solness shape-shifts in the play’s atmosphere of supernatural realism. For at least half the drama, Solness is his own most interesting idea. He wants to be more than a man, but not a god—that would mean that he wasn’t part of the action. When Solness, who is unhappily married, becomes bewitched by an uncanny young woman named Hilde Wangel, we learn something else about him: within his desire, he is a perverse, lovesick, liminal being [...] Solness is many things at once, although he tries not to be: he represses much of his character in order to become a successful brand—the master architect—in the eyes of a public that’s more fascinated by the myth of heroic male creativity than by its complicated, internal reality.