A Fiennes romance that’s sizzlingly hot
FEW things would trouble me less than being told I never again had to sit through Ibsen’s peculiar play The Master Builder, yet the Old Vic’s new production has an addictive quality — and her name is Snook. Australian actress Sarah Snook plays Hilde Wangel. She arrives in the story as a strawberry-blonde hiker, rucksack over her shoulders, long dress hitched up to betray pinkish pins.
Hilde, 23, strides into the home of builder Solness (Ralph Fiennes, jutting beard and bow-legged gait). Solness has an arid marriage and is bored by the attentions of his female secretary. He is already on the path to destruction when Hilde arrives, but she puts turbo-chargers to that descent.
The Snook-Fiennes chemistry, which flames like fired brandy, is not the only thing of high merit in this grandly staged production. Sir David Hare’s translation spares us some of the customary airlessness of 19th-century Norway.
Purists may find it too conversational and argue stiffness is essential to the play’s truth. I would say that this Matthew Warchus production, with its pace and sexiness, makes the cryptic nature of Ibsen’s BEREAVED human relationships half-bearable.
Solness and his wife and their relationship is as puzzling as always, as is Solness’s selfishness to his employees (veteran James Laurenson does a brief turn alongside Martin Hutson and Linda Emond). But at least there is plenty of theatricality.
Long passages of psychobabble dialogue are lifted by Snook’s busy face, which seems to alter expression each second. She has a deep voice and statuesque physique, and conveys a dangerous intensity as Hilde tells the master builder he is fated to be her love.
Fiennes throws himself into the part, and is never less than watchable. Even when Ibsen makes little sense (often), it is possible to admire the Fiennes stage technique. And in Snook he finds his perfect doubles partner. Baffling Ibsen has been at least partly humanised. And Snook? She’s a snorter.
GOOD play, good jazz, great acting: the Royal National’s new production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hits lots of right notes. We’ve had an indifferent few weeks in London theatre, but this puts things right.
August Wilson’s 1982 play is set in a recording studio in Twenties Chicago. Ma Rainey is a black jazz singer and a frightful prima donna. Her white manager Irvin (Finbar Lynch) spends much of his life saying ‘Let me handle this’ as he soothes her tantrums.
Ma i s played by Sharon D. Clarke, who could almost have been made for the part. Terrific turn from her, this. Ma is by turns impossible, brilliant at the microphone and sweetly encouraging to her stuttering nephew (Tunji Lucas).
But the story is not really about Ma, or studio boss Mr Sturdyvant (Stuart McQuarrie). It is about Ma’s long-suffering band members, one of whom, young-buck trumpeter Levee, refuses to be cowed by her or by convention.
All Levee’s cockiness and sex appeal and rage is caught fizzingly by O-T Fagbenle. Fagbenle knows how to play a horn. He can act, too. The tale of Levee’s family left the audience in sudden silence. He is supported by Lucian Msamati as cerebral pianist Toledo, lecturing his colleagues in the duty of all black people to aspire.
Toledo talks and talks. Levee is more a man of action and makes moves on Ma Rainey’s pretty girlfriend Dussie Mae (Tamara Lawrance). Clint Dyer and Giles Terera are excellent as the other band members.
A slightly odd set, designed by our old f riend Ultz (a railway station in Austria?), has the band’s practice room a long oblong basement, terribly narrow. The studio producers are upstairs in a metal builders’ cabin-style box, which swings on chains over the stage.
Does t he play have an unsatisfactory sense of justice? Well, that reflects the injustice against black Americans in the Twenties, but it arguably leaves the evening less than cathartic. Director Dominic Cooke extracts such good performances from his cast, however, that you still leave richly satisfied.