A girl stands waving and around her a rain of soap bubbles descends, so many that it almost looks like the girl is taking off. She stands swaying and her ecstasy and tears of joy slowly turn to deep despair and disbelief. What she sees cannot, cannot be true, because it destroys everything she is - into what she has made herself.
Theu Boermans directs Henrik Ibsen's Solness at the Nationale Toneel. Until the summer in flat-floor theatres, in larger venues in the new season. 'Builder Solness' (1892) is one of Norwegian Ibsen's late works, otherwise best known for such plays as Nora, A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler. The play deals with several of Ibsen's major themes - the unhappiness of women in the bourgeois household, the older artist's fear of up-and-coming youth, and the unequal struggle of idealism and vocation against everyday adversities and self-inflicted tragedies. Like much of his work, 'Master Builder Solness' grew out of something Ibsen himself had experienced, in this case a brief, violent affair with an 18-year-old Viennese student.
We see young Hilde Wangel, who invades the life of middle-aged, successful architect Halvard Solness. Solness fears the young generation as competitors, but in Hilde he finds attraction and recognition. Hilde comes to claim what he promised her a decade earlier: a kingdom. All these ten years, since childhood, she has cherished the romantic image of him as the heroic, uncompromising and unscrupulous artist, and he must be that for her. With her boundless obsession, she is the kind of girl you would rather stay away from, were it not for the fact that Solness is all too happy to flee into her air castles. Flight from the fear of going mad, flight from the oppressive trap of mutual guilt and assumptions in which he and his wife have entangled themselves. Moreover, he recognises in Hilde the same nothingness that has made him great in the world but lonely around him. Hilde promises Solness a new future, but in return demands of him what he cannot deliver. This can only lead to disaster.
Boermans has done well to portray the emotional story in understated direction. The failed lives come into focus all the more poignantly. In an austere set of movable white tables, illusion and impending doom are symbolically depicted as soap bubbles, which appear several times and in changing guises. In two hours of theatre without intermission, 'Solness' effortlessly sucks the spectator into a world of damaged characters.
The leading roles in particular are excellent. Mark Rietman shines as the grumpy Halvard Solness, who has ruthlessly sacrificed his surroundings to his career: his former teacher Brovik, his far too talented son Ragnar, Ragnar's fiancée Caja, but especially his own wife Aline. The awkwardness with which he initially tries to wipe away his past in front of Hilde seems tailor-made for Rietman.
Betty Schuurman beautifully restrains the drama of the disillusioned wife. Her husband has destroyed her life, but a sense of duty compels her to keep serving him.
A frankly excellent debut with the National Theatre is made by Anna Raadsveld as Hilde. Raadsveld is immediately convincing as Rietman's counterpart. By turns playful, childlike, wise, provocative, ecstatic, irritating and desperate, Hilde lures the master builder out of his tent, but she is at her best in that final moment of desperation - the moment when her ultimate castle in the air collapses, dragging the lives of everyone involved into the abyss.
- Seen: 25 April, Theater aan het Spui, The Hague.
- Information and playlist: www.nationaletoneel.nl/solness
Photo: Solness - the National Theatre - Mark Rietman, Anna Raadsveld - photo Kurt Van der Elst
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