In the following essay, the author gives a good overview of Ibsen's play The Master Builder.

Two different kinds of play are interlinked in The Master Builder. The first introduced is a naturalistic social drama concerning a successful, middle-aged man's attempt to block the path of a potential younger rival (Ragnar Brj vik), whose father he himself displaced; working on the susceptible nature of Ragnar's finacée, Kaia, Master-Builder Solness has created an infatuation with himself which will keep both young people, and Old Brj vik, working in his office. Still within Act I, a drama of the inner life—of fantasy, obsession, and neurosis—begins with the arrival of youth personified in Hilde Wangel and ousts the first level of the play from the centre of attention. The disturbing strangeness of the work as a whole springs from Ibsen's maintaining and interrelating the...