Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In Lila Raicek\u2019s new play, architect Henry Solness has taken an old building and turned it into something new: transforming an ancient church into a place of meditation. In essence, Raicek has done something similar. Working from Henrik Ibsen\u2019s 1892 drama, The Master Builder, she\u2019s written a fresh piece that follows roughly the contours of the original but transports it to the Hamptons in 2025, reshaping and expanding some key characters.Issues that swirl around in Ibsen\u2019s original take on added weight in the current era. It\u2019s an idea rich with potential, but the result feels curiously wooden and inauthentic, even with Ewan McGregor in the lead.When we first meet McGregor\u2019s Henry, he is delivering a press conference to mark the opening of his new building. There\u2019s already a glimmer of fragility: we learn that he has become prey to vertigo and can\u2019t ascend to the top of his own structure. It will later emerge that the new sanctuary is created in honour of his young son, who died 10 years previously.\u00a0Switch to the preparations for a celebratory party and all sorts of other demons start to creep out of the woodwork. Henry\u2019s unhappy wife Elena (played with terrific bite and drive by Kate Fleetwood) fancies Henry\u2019s former apprentice and now rival Ragnar (David Ajala); Ragnar is in a relationship with Elena\u2019s assistant Kaia (Mirren Mack). Meanwhile Kaia has invited her friend, Mathilde, to the party: a young woman who turns out to have history with Henry from when she was his student a decade earlier. As the booze flows, the bad faith swells in the air until you can barely breathe.Ibsen\u2019s original is steeped in symbolism and thick with themes: hubris, guilt, regret and jealousy stalk the action. The play was partly autobiographical and in response, Raicek brings her own lived experience to bear. A programme note explains how she found herself a guest at a swish dinner in the Hamptons where she was clearly a pawn in a game between a married couple. Here that unfolds as an ugly three-way struggle, producing highly charged confrontations about desire, love, the abuse of power and the limited agency of women.But timely as all this is, the situation feels oddly contrived and the dialogue often stiff and airless. McGregor suggests that Henry\u2019s confident exterior is undermined by grief and remorse, but he struggles to animate some cloying lines. \u201cYou were like this brilliant beam of light in the dark tunnel of my life,\u201d he says at one point. Another character talks of someone \u201cundressing you with his eyes\u201d \u2014 the sort of clich\u00e9 that should have vanished with the first draft. And then there is Mathilde herself, who is expanded from the original and played with immense poise by Elizabeth Debicki, but still feels more like an idea than a person.Richard Kent\u2019s handsome set and Paule Constable\u2019s eloquent lighting suggest a liminal location, where fashionable people run up against the rawness of nature. Ajala and Mack bring wit and spark and the usually excellent Michael Grandage directs with pace. But not even he can solve the melodramatic ending. This new piece feels like one of those renovations that hasn\u2019t quite worked.\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606\u2606To July 12, mymasterbuilderplay.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In Lila Raicek\u2019s new play, architect Henry Solness has taken an old building and turned it into something new: transforming an ancient church into a place<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":295546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-295545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295547,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295545\/revisions\/295547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}