My Master Builder at Wyndham’s Theatre review: Ewan McGregor's first stage appearance in 17 years is a dud

Gratifying as it is to see Ewan McGregor back on stage after 17 years, I wish he’d found a better vehicle than this so-called “new play” by American writer Lila Raicek, which feeds Henrik Ibsen’s problematic 1892 work The Master Builder through the blender of contemporary sexual politics.

Michael Grandage’s brisk take on the glib, howlingly pretentious script can be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure, a celeb-heavy melodrama of sex and power that owes more to Fifty Shades of Grey than to serious #MeToo fictions. But really, it’s a load of old nonsense.

The truly weird thing about this pairing of star and material is that McGregor’s character, international architect Henry Solness is a drippy blank. While waffling about “memory and meaning” in construction and mooning over his regrets, he’s out-characterised and out-emoted by his female co-stars.

Kate Fleetwood plays Solness’s wife Elena in full-on, steel-eyed Valkyrie mode, slashing through every scene she’s in. Elizabeth Debicki (The Crown, The Night Manager) has a cool, languid abandon as his younger lover Mathilde and is so tall and slender in a silver dress she resembles a thermometer.

It’s slightly comic that the plot’s biggest moment hinges on Solness’s vertigo when his lover tops him by a head. Is she worth the climb? The generation gap between them also has less impact than it should because McGregor seems not to have aged in 30 years. Maybe he has a portrait in his attic. Or maybe it’s in a better play.

(Johan Persson)

Anyway. We’re in the Hamptons, where Scottish Solness and his English wife Elena (“I’m the head of a major publishing empire!”) are preparing to celebrate his reinvention of an old whaling church near their own historic beach house, with a Fourth of July party. Foreshadowing klaxon! The couple suffered a loss, bound up with a fire in that church, that fractured but didn’t quite sever them.

Until now. For Elena has invited her maybe-lover Ragnar (David Ajala), who is also Solness’s architectural protégé and a believer in “hedonistic sustainability”, to the party. She’s also invited Mathilde (Debicki), the student Solness seduced or was seduced by after the aforementioned tragedy. Mathilde is now a brilliant journalist (yawn) who’s written a thinly disguised fruity novel (double yawn) about their affair that addresses consent, dominance, submission and (zzzzzz - oops, I nodded off there for a bit).

Much of what follows blends research-heavy references to superstar architects and the international commissions they compete for with stilted dialogue that sounds as if it’s been imperfectly translated from Ibsen-era Norwegian. “Rem Koolhaas? That old bounder!” says Solness at one point. I’m sorry - that old what now? Every time someone says “master builder” or “master bedroom” - and they use both phrases improbably often – it sounds like “masturbation”.

Ibsen’s Master Builder is a fictionalised justification of his own obsession with a younger woman, portrayed as a folkloric spirit or troll. In her “new play” that riffs on this story Raicek can’t decide if Solness is an abuser or a victim, Mathilde a slave or a mistress, Elena a wronged wife or an avenging harpy. Who really loves who? Who knows? Who cares? Debicki’s elegant Mathilde is still referred to as a troll and worse, a “gonk”.

Back in the day, Grandage coaxed film star McGregor to appear on stage in Othello and Guys and Dolls. I don’t think he serves his friend well here: I laughed at this star vehicle, not with it.

Wyndham’s Theatre, to July 12; delfontmackintosh.co.uk