Ayn Rand

THE FOUNTAINHEAD

True obsessions and absolute passions are like skyscrapers — they cast shadow on passers-by.

Howard Roark is a young, brilliant, and uncompromising architect. A revolutionary who renounces the comfort of an architect's office to labour in a stone quarry. Yet he catches the eye of Dominique Francon – the beloved of his former friend and rival Peter Keating – a woman of the highest social circles, whose father owns the quarry. A new obsession is born in both of them, one that will become their fate.

They inhabit worlds that could not be more different from one another, yet both are fatalists. Dominique cannot decide: to love Roark, or destroy him – so that neither of them would have to suffer? The love triangle draws still tighter when Dominique decides to give herself to the media magnate Wynand, so that Keating, her husband at the time, would secure the biggest commission of his life. But Wynand asks for Dominique's hand in marriage, and everything becomes impossibly complicated – for Roark, whom she adores, and her new husband Wynand become inseparable friends.

The Fountainhead (1943) by the notable novelist Ayn Rand is one of the most significant literary pieces of the 20th century, long hailed as a "hymn to individualism". Although Rand was initially met with sharp criticism and rejected by 12 publishers, this piercing, sweeping, and captivating melodrama of ideas is now enjoying renewed popularity. In European theatre, staging this work is considered a near-impossible undertaking – the web of relationships and plot lines is every bit as formidable as its ferociously strong-willed characters.