Baumeister Solness

Halvard Solness is an unscrupulous building contractor. In business as in life, this powerful man knows no boundaries. His maxim: higher, faster, further. The architect is now at his the height of his powers, and the next generation seems more and more of a threat.

One day, Hilde Wangel suddenly turns up at Solness’s door – and with her, the ghosts of his yesteryears. A dizzying battle over the interpretation of the past begins. What happened a decade ago when Solness kissed the ten-year-old Hilde and promised her “a kingdom”? Why are there three empty children’s bedrooms in the childless Solness couple’s house? Upon what bloodstained foundations has Solness built his success? “Baumeister Solness” is the dramatic portrait of a man who is driven to his death by his fear of the changes being wrought to his present.

Director Felicitas Brucker was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen for the first time in 2023 with her triumphant theatrical thriller “Nora” (“A Doll’s House”). Now she is again dedicating herself to the work of Henrik Ibsen, that profound analyst of the nightmare of the bourgeois family. With Hilde Wangel, the focus is on a luminous female character who radically takes up the fight against her environment.

“Hilde Wangel confronts an inner demon that nonetheless attracts her. I see her urge to re-encounter Solness as an act of inner purgation – as liberation from a demon that has been with her for so long it has taken on an ineffable dimension. She wants to see it shrunk to its true size.”

– Annika Neugart, actor