The Master Builder (1958)

In many ways autobiographical, Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder is a spectacular tale of the fall from grace. It is a tale of greed and betrayal, love and infidelity, kings and pawns – in short, all those titillating elements which so many seek in soaps, but told with the uncompromising literary intensity of one of the 19th Century’s greatest playwrites.

Ibsen’s protagonist, Halvard Solness, is a successful Architect; a man who has clawed his way to the pinnacle of fame and position by virtue of his genius and ruthlessness. But as the The Master Builder opens, Solness has already begun to suffer his success as relations with his wife are crumbling.