The great architect Halvard Solness has built a kingdom on the hills of Norway, but his towers cast long shadows. At the height of his powers, he is devoured by a terror he cannot name: the fear that young forces are rising to supplant him, that his creative fire is dying, that the younger generation will do what he once did and do it better. His assistant Ragnar Brovik dreams of building homes of his own. His wife Aline carries the weight of a fire that killed their children years ago, a fire Solness barely escaped. And then there's Hilde Wangel, a strange young woman who arrives with the force of fate itself, insisting that Solness once promised her a kingdom. What follows is a psychological duel that builds toward an inevitable, devastating climax. Ibsen strips a man down to his core anxieties and shows us the machinery of a great ego destroying itself. This is a play about what happens when a man who has built everything discovers he has built his own prison.
