West End Reviews for My Master Builder starring Ewan McGregor, Elizabeth Debicki & Kate Fleetwood

"Ewan McGregor makes an exquisite return to UK theatre in My Master Builder"

"American playwright Lila Raicek offers a punchy and poisonous spin on Ibsen’s original play"

"In the lead role Ewan McGregor buzzes with charisma as he returns to the London stage after many years’ absence."

"Elena, beautifully played with brittle bitterness by Fleetwood, has all the world weariness of a successful woman for ever overlooked in favour of her even more famous spouse."

"Michael Grandage’s robustly elegant production guides us confidently through Raicek’s appealingly murky mixture of sex, power and professional status, using Elena to demonstrate how female empowerment and solidarity can curdle when it comes to sexual jealousy."

"Ewan McGregor’s cheating starchitect is torn down"

"Ibsen is moved to the Hamptons in Lila Raicek’s play, co-starring Kate Fleetwood and Elizabeth Debicki, about the destruction wreaked by adultery"

"Henrik Ibsen’s Icarus-like architect is indubitably the patrician protagonist of his play The Master Builder... In Lila Raicek’s modern take, his wife – clever, accomplished and angry – is the fulcrum."

"Fleetwood is magnetic as Elena and she eclipses McGregor, who is boyishly earnest in his relationship with Mathilde, despite playing the older man. He seems genuinely in love and does not have the bearing of the narcissist he is supposed to be. There is not quite the chemistry between Mathilde and Henry either, although both actors are able in their parts."

"There are moments of great intensity, mostly in the scenes featuring Fleetwood, and real candescence to the writing at its best. The focus on the women is interesting and intriguing, even though it means Henry feels rather spare to the drama.... Really, it is the drama of The Master Builder’s Wife."

"Ewan McGregor struggles to raise the roof in his stage return"

"Back on the London stage after 17 years, McGregor’s allure is undimmed but he fails to summon the necessary intensity for Ibsen’s tragedy"

"Thanks not least to Star Wars, McGregor’s name remains no small box-office draw. Yet, while it’s nice to have him treading the boards again – his allure undimmed – he struggles to attain the intensity required to raise the roof as Solness, a Scot-Brit “starchitect” whose ascendancy is poised for a vertiginous fall."

"Given how often of late high-profile men have reaped the whirlwind of rapacious behaviour, the work seems ripe for a topical update. But Raicek’s spin – re-located to the monied Hamptons on July 4 – is less serrated than expected."

"What should deepen and tauten the drama alas throws up inconclusive thoughts on empowerment and a ton of emotional overstatement. It’s hard to care about this lot"

"Instead of gathering momentum, a mood of melodrama takes hold, with McGregor finally seeming rather lost amid Richard Kent’s imposing, climbable set of horizontal slats and secreted stairs."

"Ewan McGregor’s cheating architect is undone at a Hamptons party from hell in My Master Builder"

"In this feminist reimagining of Ibsen’s original, the actor’s star power is outshone by his formidable co-star Kate Fleetwood"

"Lila Raicek’s feminist reimagining of Ibsen’s The Master Builder should be obligatory viewing for the put-upon wives of TV’s Grand Designs"

"Here, Ewan McGregor brings serious charm to the role of the titular architect Henry Solness, but his star power is entirely outshone by Kate Fleetwood’s formidable acting chops as his furious wife Elena, bent on bringing his dreams crashing down to the ground."

"... Raicek’s play is bracing enough to make you forget this production’s flimsier aspects. She’s a relative newcomer to writing for the stage, but she cut her teeth working on bingeable TV dramas Younger and Gossip Girl. That training shows in the way her play sweeps you along, into a breezy study of a great man whose scheming wife gets the last laugh."

"This Ewan McGregor-starring Ibsen rewrite is thoughtful but lacking in fireworks"

"Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage."

"The original Master Builder is a weird, stodgy play, and Raicek’s version does a lot to address its issues: there are much better female characters and none of the old stultifying symbolism."

"The main trouble is that there is a power imbalance within Michael Grandage’s production: Debicki and Fleetwood are hardly nobodies, but McGregor is the big name in this female-centric rewriting of Ibsen."

"... taking pains to make Henry broadly inoffensive leaves him as a fairly boring character. He’s the biggest role, and we hear lots from him: about his grief, about his guilt, about his desires, about architecture. But pare away the words and there’s nothing much happening, just a nice guy blundering through a genteel midlife crisis."

"Ewan McGregor struggles to animate My Master Builder"

"Lila Raicek’s play is a wooden and contrived take on Ibsen’s drama at Wyndham’s Theatre, London"

"... timely as all this is, the situation feels oddly contrived and the dialogue often stiff and airless."

"... 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’t quite worked."

"Ewan McGregor can’t save a dodgy Ibsen revamp"

"Kudos to the A-lister for appearing on a London stage for the first time in nearly 20 years, yet he doesn’t have the gravitas needed"

"This is going to be a test of faith for Ewan McGregor’s admirers. How much are they willing to endure to see him in the flesh in a painfully windy psychodrama, modelled on Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which grinds its way to a wildly implausible conclusion?"

"... the truth is that he simply doesn’t have the gravitas needed for the role of a superstar architect whose personal life is about to implode."

"In so far as she beefs up the roles of the spouse and the younger woman who watch the hero self-destruct, she has improved on the overwrought original. Unfortunately, her characters express themselves in sophomoric dialogue in which every other sentence tries to express some grand philosophical truth."

"... you’re left wondering how this play made it to the West End, and why Grandage and McGregor decided to take a gamble on it."

"Ewan McGregor's first stage appearance in 17 years is a dud"

"This play boasts a glib, howlingly pretentious script and a drippy central character in McGregor’s architect Henry Solness"

"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"

"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."

"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."

"I laughed at this star vehicle, not with it."

"Ibsen spin-off with Ewan McGregor is ill-constructed"

"The intention is clearly to turn Ibsen’s musings on male creativity and potency into a more relevant discussion of sexual politics."

"The language constantly strives for the poetic but becomes impossibly stilted, leaving the actors making speeches at each other rather than interacting. McGregor in particular, making his return to the London stage after 17 years, seems desperately uncomfortable."

"Only Fleetwood thrives, endowing Elena with a fierce energy, her eyes narrowing as she contrives her moment of reckoning. But in trying to reshape the play and give the women some agency, Raicek simply creates new problems."

"Insubstantial riff on Ibsen"

"Ewan McGregor and Elizabeth Debicki star in a glossy, contrived response to Ibsen’s classic"

"Successful older man betrays his wife to exploit the infatuation of a young, beautiful woman: it’s an everyday tale of sexual politics and banal midlife crisis. But in this new play by American writer Lila Raicek, the power doesn’t always lie quite where you’d expect."

"I’d love to be able to report that this reframing proves illuminating – but while it’s a relief not to be presented with two female roles that, deriving from Ibsen’s template, could so easily amount to embittered, dutiful spouse and manic pixie dream girl, Raicek’s innovations still feel pretty boilerplate."

"McGregor’s Henry ends up as little more than the fraying ball of wool batted about in the catfights, and Raicek saddles him with some truly toe-curling moments in his steamier encounters with Debicki’s coolly poised Mathilde. It’s Fleetwood who supplies the stellar turn here, by turns vengeful, maudlin and magnificent. I just wish she had something more flavourful and substantial to sink those sharp teeth into."

"John Lithgow v Ewan McGregor — there’s only one winner"

"The Trainspotting actor returns to the British stage at last"

"... My Master Builder, a new play by the American Lila Raicek inspired by Ibsen’s The Master Builder, has aspirations to profundity that are washed away by its hokeyness. Ewan McGregor, in his first British stage role since 2007, is thoroughly unconvincing as the title character"

"Kate Fleetwood is exceptional as Solness’s wife, Elena, an outspoken publishing bigwig readying to divorce him."

"Yet fitful moments of raw insight about marriage are obliterated by line after line of characters reminding each other of shared experiences, of soapish grandiosity"

"The director Michael Grandage, normally excellent, can do nothing to curb the risible stiltedness of it all"

"Ewan McGregor, Back Onstage, Is the Architect of His Own Folly"

"“My Master Builder,” a new take on the Ibsen classic, reduces a complex play to a tawdry marital melodrama."

"When a big star appears in a conspicuously undercooked show, what rankles is the apparent cynicism — the conceited presumption that the sheer aura of an individual talent will compensate for any shortcomings."

"Raicek’s interpretation sets out to center Ibsen’s female characters, retelling the story through the lens of #MeToo — but it ends up reducing a complex play to a tawdry marital melodrama."

"This sordid story is thrashed out over two emotionally charged hours, in a register that toggles uneasily between soapy cliché and cynical sass."

"... the romantic quarrels feature some of the most stilted and shopworn dialogue that anyone will hear on a West End stage this year. Lumbered with such material, it is easy to understand the underwhelming drabness of McGregor’s performance."

"It is largely thanks to Fleetwood that the show holds together at all."

"It is somewhat unfortunate that, in seeking to right a nonexistent wrong, McGregor, 54, and Grandage, 62 — working in collaboration with a much younger female writer — have erected a folly of their own."

"Ewan McGregor fails to excite in heavy-handed spin on Ibsen's Master Builder"

"Ibsen’s play could certainly do with a going over. But not this one, writes The Observer's theatre critic Susannah Clapp"

"... everything is made explicit: arguments are overspelled out, sexual possibilities awkwardly enacted. There is no inner propulsion."

"It is a puzzle that Michael Grandage, fleetest of directors, was drawn to this script, which makes actors shrivel."

"The crackle of the evening comes from Kate Fleetwood. As the architect’s wife, the most fully written role, she brings the snap of her Lady Macbeth, but glints also with loss, affection and unfulfilled potential. Let’s hope to see her in a mightier part soon."