[ssba]
Fixing Words That Go Clunk in the Night
How Wallace Shawn brought Heinrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder Solness to life
Book Review: A Master Builder by Wallace Shawn
By Bob Verini
Editor’s Note: Bob Verini has written an enchanting review of Wallace Shawn’s A Master Builder, adapted last year from Ibsen’s play The Master Builder Solness. Verini describes the linguistic fastidiousness with which Shawn plucked a sometimes clumsy play from the 19th century and massaged it into the 21st, as though he, Shawn, were himself Ibsen’s architect Solness. Not coincidentally, Shawn played Solness in Jonathan Demme’s limited release film adaptation, also last year. In a post-screening talk-back (below), Shawn describes his perplexity over some of Demme’s executive/interpretive decisions — not with hostility, but with a kind of child-like amazement. And there it is, the text being the clay of the playwright, and the interpretations of those words being the clay of the director — raising the questions for critics and audiences, who is The Master Builder in the theater, who owns the breadth of vision? Are the ultimate creative decisions authoritative or collaborative, or both? — SLM
Panel Discussion at the City University of New York on the making of Jonathan Demme’s film, A Master Builder, by and with Wallace Shawn. Photo at top: Wallace Shawn and Lisa Joyce in a scene from the film.
John Logan’s Red has been one of the most produced plays of the last few years, with over 40 mountings at major theaters coast to coast, usually reviewed in deserved superlatives. Yet in all the column inches devoted to the incisive two-hander, few if any of my critical colleagues have made reference to Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder, though they certainly could and maybe should have done.
Both plays center on larger-than-life artists at the height, or maybe the twilight, of their careers: visionary Expressionist Mark Rothko in the Logan; visionary builder of sky-scraping towers Halvard Solness in the Ibsen. Both protagonists are terrified of becoming supplanted by the next generation, personified by a hungry apprentice gnawing at the genius’s backside. Questions of God and the afterlife gnaw as well, and each is led by his demons to a tragic demise.
The point isn’t that the Chicagoan somehow ripped off the Norwegian — though a decade ago, Logan crafted his own translation of The Master Builder, which may explain some of the influence. Many important themes juggled in Ibsen’s maddening masterwork never make their way into Red, notably the ongoing war between the sexes, and the tendency of older men to attempt to reinvent themselves in pursuit of someone younger. Much, much younger.
What the parallel between Logan and Ibsen really illustrates is a common characteristic of great plays: their tendency to insinuate themselves into our cultural fabric and even into our individual consciences, whether or not we realize it. Certain works so touch a nerve, running right down to the root of who we are, as to change our perceptions of ourselves in their wake.
Who, contemplating suicide, isn’t mindful of Hamlet’s be/not-be choice laid out for the world so frankly? Who, pining for a love whom he feels is way out of his league, doesn’t think of himself as wretched Cyrano, wishing that someone handsome and dashing could take over and bring that love to fruition? When a childhood home is to be sold, only the culturally illiterate will fail to think of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard; the rest of us bid farewell to our past just like Ranevskaya, with an upraised chin and profound regret.
In The Master Builder can be located the seed of hundreds of plays and films dealing with towering geniuses tormented by their talent, doubts about divinity, and the simple needs of everyday life. Ibsen’s central romance involves Solness; his wife Aline whose passion dried up with the death of their twin sons; and young “bird of prey” (as she calls herself) Hilde Wangel, trifled with by Solness at age 12 (!) and back to claim her beloved a decade later. That triangle remains shocking a century after the work’s premiere, and yet it feels ineffably familiar because we’ve seen the same dynamic played out on stage and screen scores of times.
Is there any more reason needed for artists to revisit Master Builder Solness, as Ibsen originally titled it? The appearance of A Master Builder at the hands of Wallace Shawn hardly comes as a surprise, though it’s certainly an occasion for anticipation. Shawn has shown himself to be a playwright of prodigious gifts in works like Aunt Dan & Lemon and The Designated Mourner, competent and eager to take on themes of universal import.
Yet in dealing with Ibsen’s naggingly difficult masterwork, two problems had to be solved. They’re neatly laid out by Shawn in the published edition’s Afterword, a shimmering piece of belles-lettres well worth reading even for those who don’t give two shits about Ibsen.
The first involves the usual difficulty of transposition from one language to another, compounded by the peculiar cadences of Ibsen’s originals. We get a sense of the latter when we look at (and we can only look, we can no longer possibly stage) the versions crafted for Ibsen’s first productions in English by William Archer. A sometime playwright, esteemed critic and Shaw intimate, Archer worked from literal translations with a dogged faithfulness that left many characters’ speeches literally unspeakable. Here’s a personal favorite, from Archer’s A Doll’s House: “I had not better return with you to the croft then, Nils, had I?”
Most Ibsen translations aren’t quite that awkward, but a certain stiltedness tends to creep into the best of them. Shawn states the dilemma thus: A new version “that would sound to a contemporary audience like believable contemporary speech would have to be to a certain extent false to the feeling and atmosphere of the original text.” His chosen solution was, first, to rationalize that he was acting as a “collaborator” of the playwright. In such a collaboration, “it was probably inevitable that the role of the living collaborator would grow, while the role of the dead collaborator would not.”
Larry Pine and Wallace Shawn in Jonathan Demme’s A MASTER BUILDER
Having set aside some qualms, Shawn, like Archer, had a literal translation prepared, but he asked for as many synonyms as possible for each word. Coupled with a working knowledge of German, he was able to turn phrases as a playwright would, conveying all the sense of the original yet in an idiom a 21st century audience can accept. In Act 2, Hilde has arrived on the doorstep with barely the clothes on her back. Aline goes out to purchase some wardrobe, saying she sees it as her “duty” to a guest. Left alone with the girl, Solness remarks on his wife’s goodness and generosity. Here’s Archer:
HILDE. [Impatiently] But if she is all that—what made her say that about her duty?
SOLNESS. Her duty?
HILDE. She said that she would go out and buy something for me, because it was her duty. Oh, I can’t bear that ugly, horrid word!
SOLNESS. Why not?
HILDE. It sound so cold and sharp, and stinging. Duty—duty—duty. Don’t you think so, too? Doesn’t it seem to sting you?
SOLNESS. H’m—haven’t thought much about it.
The 1965 translation by Rolf Fjelde, one of the deans of modern Ibsen scholarship, stays pretty close to this, just replacing Hilda’s last question with “As if it were meant to cut.” Either way there’s something phony about the whole exchange; it feels like text only, subtext absent. (Not to mention that the repetition of duty would sound like a Cary Grant impersonator.) Here’s the same exchange as rendered by Shawn:
HILDE. Well—if she’s really so kind, why did she talk that way about “obligation?”
SOLNESS. “Obligation?”
HILDE. Yes—she said she was going to go out and buy some things for me—out of obligation! Christ, I hate that word — it’s so revolting, so ugly –
SOLNESS. “Obligation?”
HILDE. It sounds like someone being strangled to death.— “Obligation!” “Obligation!” Don’t you hear it? Someone being strangled . . .
SOLNESS. Well—I’ve—
Look at how much each character is given to play here. Hilde gets a four-syllable synonym for duty that allows her to work the word in all manner of interesting ways, low or high, guttural or airy. Meanwhile, her profane reaction is so fascinatingly over the top, relative to Aline’s benign comment; as to force us to wonder, “What the hell kind of creature is this, anyway?” Solness has to wonder too. Notice how his first Obligation is a way of saying “Oh? Is that what she said?,” while the second carries the subtext “What?! You hear all that ugliness in one simple word?!,” leaving him finally to merely stammer “Well—I’ve—.” He’s bewildered; overwhelmed; and as the plot requires, bewitched.
This sort of thing occurs over and over, as Shawn finds new, playable wrinkles on Ibsen’s text to give actors and audience alike meat to chew on. Anyone familiar with any previous version of the play will, I predict, read this one with a big smile on his face, experiencing it as if for the first time.
There still remains the second problem, Ibsen’s extravagant and even ludicrous dramaturgy. Here’s Shawn again: “The crucial stage direction at the very end of the play calls for a body to fall from a great height through a large group of trees. We always knew that this stage direction represented a puzzle to which we would have to find a solution.”
At the same time, Shawn was troubled by moments in Ibsen that were falling flat when staged. (You have to love the delicate way he puts it: “There were certain things in the original text that did not grow on me over the years.”) Was it fair, he asked himself, to demand that an audience “sit through minutes in which they receive little or nothing of value to them…? If Ibsen had come back to life and joined us in our rehearsal room, would he not have wanted something to be done about the moments in the play that were falling flat?”
It’s fun to imagine that confrontation. (“I had not better return with you to the trees then, Henrik, had I?”) Anyway, Shawn’s solution is radical. He kicks off the action with Solness already in a hospital bed. The first 18 pages follow Ibsen closely, albeit in the new setting and with the sick man surrounded by nurses. Once Hilde knocks on the door (on page 25 of 85), everything that occurs until the very end of the play is explicitly played as Solness’s dream, “a man’s confrontation with himself as he approaches death . . . As a drama, Master Builder Solness is terribly odd and hard to explain. As a dream, it actually makes perfect sense.”
Jonathan Demme’s 2014 A Master Builder with Wallace Shawn, Lisa Joyce and Julie Hagerty
Does it? Let the reader decide. Another facet of great plays is that they are subject to all manner of interpretation. As a matter of fact, while Andre Gregory’s stage production never appeared, Jonathan Demme saw rehearsals and offered to make a film, which received a limited release last year with Shawn in the role of Solness. My opinions of the film fall outside the scope of this report, but I can only say that reading Shawn’s version is a must for anyone serious about classic drama in English; that his rationale for the dream play interpretation is bold and beautiful; and that I hope that some company, preferably one in L.A. where we do classics justice much of the time, will be moved to produce it.
