ZINNIE Harris is under commission to the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the Royal Court, the apex of British theatre. Good news for Yorkshire, she has delivered a world premiere for West Yorkshire Playhouse too.
(The Fall Of) The Master Builder (After Henrik Ibsen) is a modern-day re-imagining of Ibsen's enigmatic 1893 study of the declining powers of an ageing artist, felled by events from his past.
Harris strips away any uncertainties: we are in a post-Savile age, where both the Tory Party and Liberal Democrats are faced by headlines of alleged sexual/child abuse from earlier eras and only the truth will suffice when we are weary of cover-ups.
The play opens with an almighty hangover and splitting headache in a white, grey soulless office amid the debris after the celebration party the night before.
Reece Dinsdale's ruthless architect Halvard Solness has been crowned Master Builder; Prince Charles will be arriving later to open his new building; but around him not everything feels right.
His mentor, Brovik (Robert Pickavance), from whom he bought the architects' firm, treads warily; Brovik's son, apprentice architect Ragnar (Michael Peavoy) cannot hide his resentment of thwarted advancement; Solness is dyspeptic in his jealousy of a burgeoning young talent that will inevitably threaten his status.
Michael Peavoy, Susan Cookson, Katherine Rose Morley and Emma Naomi in (The Fall Of) The Master Builder. Picture: Manuel Harlan
His secretary Kaja (Emma Naomi), Ragnar's girlfriend to boot, may flirt but Solness's need for power games soon has her calling him names. His exhausted wife Aline (Susan Cookson) is being ground down by his selfish ways. Solness may have a flair for building design, but he is destroying all those around him, and in Harris's hands the focus is not so much on his fall, or his flaw, but on the damage he does to others.
Dinsdale's wire-tight Solness is grimly keeping an edifice of bravado and self-preservation in place until the mysterious arrival of a precocious student, Katherine Rose Morley's Hilde, who reminds him of their inappropriate first meeting five years ago, when she was 15.
The bullish swagger of Dinsdale's venal vulture makes way for sweaty fear; the already profuse swearing goes into overdrive.
In a city where the stench of Savile lingers, this is a play that will have its head on a stick as the sheen of director James Brining's initially sleek representation of office politics makes way for the heavy-footed symbolism of everything compressing Solness, the office furniture crashing all around him as designer Alex Lowde's set moves forward.
It leaves all but Solness lined up with a row of microphones and seats beyond the stage apron for witness statements of abuse: verbatim theatre that is accumulatively more impactful than that stage crush.
A graphic Greek drama for today, Harris's harrowing play is full of unpleasant truths, not only about child abuse, but also family relations, office practices, the stultifying old fearing the rise of the young and just how miserable so much life is.
(The Fall Of) The Master Builder runs at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until October 21. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk
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