Master Builder
In All the Universe, I Alone Am God
Henrik Ibsen published Bygmester Solness in December 1892, and for the next hundred and twenty-two years nobody staged it in Gujarati. When Ila Arun and K K Raina's Surnai Theatre invited Ideas Unlimited to make work for the first Ibsen Theatre Festival in Mumbai, Manoj Shah went through the whole canon looking for the play nobody had claimed. Every other major Ibsen — A Doll's House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt — had already been translated into Gujarati, several of them performed. The Master Builder had not been translated, adapted or staged even once. "It is my choice and my decision," he wrote in his director's note, "to check myself as an artist." Chirantana Bhatt's adaptation moves the play from Norway to Mumbai, and Halvard Solness becomes Akhil Nanavati — an architect who prefers to be called a master builder, and who has made his name building temples. Ibsen's Christian imagery, gothic spires and mythic creatures give way to something older: the Sompura lineage of hereditary temple architects, the shikhara, three thousand years of building towards the sky. Knut Brovik, the old draughtsman Solness has broken, becomes Bhanushankar Sompura; his son Ragnar becomes Aadarsh; Hilde Wangel, who arrives out of nowhere to collect on a promise, becomes Kamya. Shah compressed Ibsen's three acts into two. Akhil is at the top and terrified of it. He is vain, unjust to the very people he learnt from, and frightened of the generation coming up behind him. His marriage to Saumya is a ruin held together by a fire years ago that took their children. Then Kamya walks in — twenty-four, from another town — and reminds him that they are not strangers, that he once made her a promise she chose to believe. She takes a place in his house, then in his practice, then in his head. She also discovers that the man who builds towers cannot bear heights. At the public opening of his newest building she asks him to climb it anyway. He does. He falls. Of the crowd standing appalled around the body, only Kamya steps forward, and she is smiling: my master builder. The poster carried the whole argument in a single line. Narsinh Mehta's fifteenth-century bhajan opens Akhil brahmandma ek tu Shrihari — in all the universe, you alone are God. Ideas Unlimited changed one word. Ek hu ja Shrihari: I alone am God. The architect's name is Akhil. Master Builder was made for the inaugural Ibsen Theatre Festival in Mumbai, ran at Bhaidas Auditorium on 9 November 2014, and had its first independent show at Prithvi Theatre on 14 December 2014.
Commissioned By
Surnai Theatre and Folk Arts Foundation
Created for the first Ibsen Theatre Festival in Mumbai (31 October – 2 November 2014), presented by Ila Arun and K K Raina's Surnai Theatre and Folk Arts Foundation in collaboration with the Norwegian Embassy. The festival's invitation sent Manoj Shah through Ibsen's complete works — and to the one major play that had never been translated, adapted or performed in Gujarati.
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