LONDON, ENGLAND. Alan Bates is fueling up. Sitting in a cozy Italian bistro a few doors from London's Theatre Royal Haymarket, the actor is steadily consuming his customary preshow plate of pasta. In a couple of hours he will stalk onto the stage as the glowering and tormented architect Halvard Solness in Henrik Ibsen's "The Master Builder" and, like an athlete before a game, he's stoking up on carbohydrates.
"It's a very demanding play," he explains between bites.
This is a characteristically understated remark. An eviscerating, soul-plumbing work written near the end of the Norwegian playwright's life, "The Master Builder" is an intense and wrenching portrait of the scarred soul of an artist and the psychological agony of aging.
Solness, a once-towering builder who feels his personal and professional potency failing, is tortured by the emotional price he has paid for his art and terrified of losing his touch. Trapped by guilt and shared loss in a parasitic marriage, he finds himself both redeemed and doomed by the love of a much younger woman.

| Style and shrewdness |

A man aging with messy ill temper, Solness stands in contrast to the 61-year-old Bates, an actor aging with power and grace. Over the steady course of a rich 40-year career, he has matured from young lion to senior artist with style and shrewdness, finding roles to showcase his talent at all the stages of his life.
Bates has avoided both creative stagnation and personal self-destruction -- the doom of some of his British contemporaries -- and has largely escaped the whims of fashion. He has simply got on with the job of acting.
A leading player in British theatre's mid-50s creative explosion, Bates burst onto the scene in John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" [right, with Mary Ure] before becoming an icon of the gritty British new wave in 60s films like "The Entertainer," "A Kind of Loving," and "Women in Love."
His post-60s film work is eclectic -- late 70s American movies such as "An Unmarried Woman" and "The Rose" and small English pieces like "We Think the World of You." In the 80s he turned to fine television plays, including John Mortimer's "A Voyage Round My Father" and Alan Bennett's "An Englishman Abroad." And he has always returned to the theatre, forging strong associations with playwrights including Harold Pinter, David Storey and Simon Gray.
The young Bates's sexy intensity has matured into the smoldering rage of the older actor's Solness, a man wracked by passions he only partly understands. Vain, arrogant, selfish and manipulative, his Solness is alternately infuriating and pitiful. It's an arresting performance, but Bates has often been praised in anguished and riven roles.
"Well, an awful lot of great plays are about the agonies of life," he says. "When you play King Lear, you play agony. When you play Hamlet, you play torment. When you play Othello you play jealousy and paranoia."

| Striking Modernity |

Solness, arguably, embodies all these qualities at once. Ibsen's intensity has given him an unfair and unfortunate reputation for a gloomy, uniquely Nordic blend of the dour and the decadent.
This production, directed by Royal Shakespeare Company founder Peter Hall, disproves that myth. To be sure, "The Master Builder" is an emotionally flamboyant piece, marked by Ibsen's peculiar blend of psychological penetration, poetic symbolism and Scandinavian mysticism.
The production reveals the striking modernity of Ibsen's psychological insight -- this is a Faustian tragedy in which the devil is time. Solness' tragedy is that the past catches up with him and the future overtakes him.
Ibsen's burning dialogue -- captured in a fresh translation by Hall and Inga-Stina Ewbank -- caps a bubbling cauldron of subtext, and Hall's solid, foursquare stagecraft offers a showcase for bold but finely shaded acting by the central trio of Bates, Gemma Jones and newcomer Victoria Hamilton [left]. They give full play to the characters' complex, devious and half-understood emotions and uncover a vitality and humour that come as a pleasant surprise to many viewers.
"We've had an awful lot of, 'I didn't know Ibsen could be like this.'" notes Bates. "There is a sort of received idea about Ibsen. I think it's because he goes so deeply into soul-baring and the dark side of relationships. That isn't always what people want to see on a night out. But if you want to learn something and receive something, it's very rewarding stuff.
"We play it swiftly. And the play is full of humour, which we're trying to dig out. The characters mirror human conditions, in which everybody can recognize some aspects of themselves -- bereavement, guilt, paranoia, ambition, love. But they are so extreme. Particularly Solness. He's rather ridiculous in the first act. But he's just on the verge of realizing it and recognizing his paranoia. That can be quite funny -- though when he really faces the paranoia it's not so funny."
Bates is thankful for the opportunity to move easily between film, television and theatre -- one of the benefits of living in England, with its vital theatre scene and relatively adventurous television industry.

| Anything Can Happen |

"I've always embraced the three media -- film, television and theatre," he says. "Each is rewarding in its own way. Television is the most frustrating, because it's only seen once or twice. A film has a longer life -- and I love the intimacy of filming. With television there is less of a sense of occasion about the performance.
"On an acting level, theatre is the most demanding and the most rewarding. You're in charge of it. The audience is responding as you do it. You're all there together, and anything can happen."
Gracious and matter-of-fact, Bates belongs to the "just do it" school of British actors. But he clearly loves and respects the craft of acting, and is thoughtful when asked how he approaches Ibsen's rumbling volcano of emotion.
"Ibsen is like Pinter -- you've got to just let him be. I asked a friend of mine, a director who's done a lot of Ibsen, how to approach the play, and he told me 'Just do it. He thinks for himself. Just do it as simply and as realistically as you know how.'
"Acting isn't magic, but it is mysterious. You don't quite know why you want to do it or how you do it when you get there. You just do. Your job is simply to go beneath the lines and play all the resonances of those lines. I suppose the secret lies in the ability to believe you're someone else sufficiently for other people to believe it, too."
And he has no doubt that there will always be an audience for serious theatre.
"I sometimes wonder about this huge swing to musicals. Are people so easily satisfied with something that is so light? With so many of the musicals today, you go through the exit door and you can't even remember you've been there. It's quite pleasant when you're there, but it doesn't stay with you at all.
"It's rather like "Dynasty" or something. It doesn't do anything to you. It doesn't feed you. It's like you go into a trance, and when you come out of it, you've forgotten it.
"But that's why theatre is relevant. People don't stay in that state. They strive to get out. People seek a spiritual solution or help -- it may not be the orthodox one, but people seek more than they're getting.
"Theatre isn't religion, but it can feed people.|||