“It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature – and that the rest will betray it.” Thus spake Ayn Rand, in a foreword to a 1968 edition of her 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

For the Russian-born Rand (1905-1982), who wept in wonder at the sight of the Manhattan skyline in 1926, thereafter embracing America like a lover, the fate of humanity lay in the few, not the many. The darling of libertarians, and proponent of the virtue of laissez-faire capitalism as a system that demands and rewards the best in every individual, she regarded as supreme that single-minded “noble soul” who cleaves unyieldingly to their vision, come what may.

She made that type flesh in her 700-page opus. Howard Roark is a modernist architect who’d rather starve than swallow any compromise, which corrosive element is seen as the very cornerstone of a stable career in the client-chasing world in which he moves.

Though Roark’s steely progress might seem an off-road subject-choice for the Belgian theatre-maker Ivo van Hove, so adored by fashionable theatre-followers – the majority of whom (one suspects) would recoil from Rand’s philosophy – his adaptation at the Lowry Centre in Salford fits his pattern of preoccupation.