'Playwright Lila Raicek offers a punchy and poisonous spin on Ibsen's original play... Raicek unflinchingly investigates the imbalance of the power dynamic. Grandage’s robustly elegant production guides us confidently through Raicek’s appealingly murky mixture of sex, power and professional status, using the wife to demonstrate how female empowerment and solidarity can curdle when it comes to sexual jealousy.' - the i
'In Lila Raicek’s modern take, his wife — clever, accomplished, and angry— is the fulcrum. This is very much a play about the consequence of infidelity on a marriage, and a wife's pained rage...Female camaraderie, treachery, and generational difference is explored. There are moments of great intensity, and real candescence to the writing...The focus on the women is interesting and intriguing. This a story not of genius men building castles in the air for their princesses but of what destruction they wreak in their homes in so doing.' - the Guardian
‘Raicek’s feminist reimagining should be obligatory viewing. Her writing is full of snap, vigour and provocative jokes that get the audience squirming… Women get all the best lines here, making it a welcome antidote to Ibsen’s original. Raicek is fascinated by sexual power plays and the complex ways in which women betray each other and themselves... 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.’ - the Independent
‘Explosive work. The stage crackles with dangerous energy. At the climax, Raicek writes a cathartic, blood-and-guts scene where all the long-buried truths of the relationship are laid bare. Dramatically, this is pure gold.’ - the Spectator
‘A prodigious New York talent…and the talk of the town. Raicek has a poetic and pathological ear and a writing style somewhere between Ibsen, Patrick Marber and Luca Guadagino.’ - Tatler
‘It’s Ibsen meets Succession. It’s a twisted climbing frame of human misery that Raicek has constructed…and it makes for a uniquely satisfying night of theatre.’ - the New European
'Do you remember how long ago it was? The last time we saw each other…'
On the eve of July 4th, in the Hamptons, Elena Solness, a publishing magnate, is preparing to throw a party to celebrate her husband, Henry, as he unveils his latest architectural masterpiece.
But their already vulnerable union is shattered by the unexpected arrival of Mathilde, a former student of Henry’s, with whom he previously shared an intimate connection. As the evening unfolds, each find themselves face to face with a reckoning the indelibly tilts the axis of their lives.
Inspired by Ibsen, Lila Raicek's My Master Builder is a startling play that lays bare the vulnerabilities we expose when we leave ourselves open to love.
play script available here: