Stewart is amazing

What a disturbing variation on 21st century values, how piquantly topical Ibsen's drama of guilt, retribution and illicit sexual relations proves to be in Anthony Page's traditional though enthralling production.

Patrick Stewart looks the suitable picture of sombre, dark-suited Victorian respectability as the famous architect Halvard Solness. Yet there is an indefinably furtive, foxy air about him as he bustles into his office at home and erupts in fury. It as though something nasty could be lurking in his soul.

And so it is. In The Master Builder, one man's nightmare comes true. That which has been repressed makes its return. And it comes in human form. Stewart's Solness certainly does not suffer enough, but he has all the rough, dangerous edge of the power-seeker who has abandoned his scruples. No sooner has this unhappily married master builder confessed his fear that the younger generation is hammering at the door, than there duly comes a knock. Who should appear but Hilde Wangel, wearing long blonde hair, a rucksack and her heart on her sleeve.

Lisa Dillon, in a sensational London stage debut after only leaving RADA in 2002, makes Miss Wangel not the usual, simpering ingenue, but a sexually ardent, intense young woman, determined to take possession of Solness, body and soul and make him submit to her strange will.

The architect has not seen Hilde since he bent her backwards 10 years ago when she was only 13, smothered her with kisses and maybe did much more. Ibsen posits a situation which we would today find odd or mysterious. Miss Wangel arrives not as a sex victim, seeking blackmail or revenge. Having been smitten in preadolescence, she is eager to discover why Solness has not returned to claim her as he said he would or come to give her the "kingdom" he promised.

This play, with its quality of nightmare, would be best acted non realistically, without the exceptionally handsome trappings of the stylish, white-walled Scandinavian environment that designer Hildegard Bechtler creates. But the high emotional voltage of Page's production casts its own spell and conceals the fact that The Master Builder lacks Ibsen's usual excitement of revelation and reaction when characters unpick secrets from their past.

Instead, confessions are simply paraded. Solness is riddled with guilt about the way his career has flourished at the expense of an unloved wife, Aline, whose mental balance has been disturbed since the demise of twins in infancy. And Hilde's arrival leads to a highly charged dance of desire and death with Solness, in which Hilde struggles to make her dreams come true.

Stewart, who makes an interestingly plebeian, selfabsorbed Solness, electrifies the stage with his excessive outbursts of rage and revels in a selfish opportunism that ruins his infatuated clerk (Katherine Manners) and draughtsman (Andrew Scarborough). But he is insufficiently bothered or bewitched by Hilde, with her mad plans for him to climb to the heights of the new home.

Despite being too mature for the role, Sue Johnston makes a superlatively grief-stricken Aline, cold, cutting, half crazy with unresolved sadness and sobbing over her lost dolls rather than dead children. She and Miss Dillon as a Hilde wildly exulting over Solness's nemesis best capture the essence of this weird Ibsen.

The Master Builder