How did you discover this particular play and why you were drawn to wanting to direct it?
Adrian Noble:
I first became interested in Brand about 20 years ago through my connection with Michael Elliot when I was working at the Manchester Royal Exchange. I became rather intrigued with it because it somehow apparently marked a bit of a watershed in British theatre. So I read it and loved it but held it in my back pocket for many, many years - partly because I didn't really know how to approach it and partly because it's very hard to identify an actor with the range of skills and artistic temperament to play the title role. A role which, incidentally, is of Lear-like proportions.
About four years ago, the play surfaced again in my mind as a play I wanted to do and I realised that Ralph Fiennes, with whom I'd worked 10 years before, would be absolutely ideal casting, so I approached him. I actually took the play to him when he was working on his sister's movie of Eugene Onegin - I left it with him to read as he didn't know the play and I didn't really hear anything for a long time until Ralph was doing Richard II for the Almeida. I went to see the show, and when I went to see him in his dressing room afterwards he said "Look, I'd really like to talk further about Brand. So we met up and carried on meeting on many occasions, finally making a pact to do the play together and it's taken this long to find the right slot in all of our diaries - but now we're finally underway.
What qualities do you think Ralph will bring to this difficult role?
Adrian Noble:
Just after he'd written the play Ibsen is quoted as saying that in some respects the character Brand could just as well have been a sculptor, or an architect. The fact that he's a priest seems to me to be pretty fundamental, however. He's a man who is wrestling with an extraordinary spiritual journey and undergoes some amazing psychological changes, but the fundamentals of the character are, of course, the fundamentals of Lutheranism which have to do with quite fine, but rigorous, moral and spiritual choices.
From working with Ralph on Henry VI a long time ago, I knew that he has the sort of artistic intelligence, the emotional intelligence, the spiritual appetite to take on board those spiritual issues and moral dilemmas that are at the very heart of the play. He is also, of course, the right age, as Brand is a relatively young man who gets a bit older during the course of the play. The actor playing the role also has to have extraordinary tenacity as a performer because it is an absolutely vast role. He has to be charismatic, and he has to be highly inventive because almost single-handedly he has to take the audience on a most challenging journey.
When you visited Norway with Ralph to research the play, did you find out anything that will be of use to you in staging it?
Adrian Noble:
Brand is an interesting play because, famously, it wasn't really written to be performed on stage. It has many of the characteristics of a narrative poem and it doesn't conform to many of the rules, particularly of 19th century drama. It also seems at times to quite severely lack connective tissue - particularly in the version we're using. That, however, is very exciting to work on because you have to make bold choices as you're working with a very spare, lean script. On the other hand, it means that there's a real onus on the artists involved to fill in the picture for themselves so Ralph and I felt that it would be really helpful for us to travel to Norway and just work on the play in that particular context.
The trip was a kind of odyssey - we had four or five days working intensively on the text and travelled to some of the local places and tried to imagine the culture that may have come out of them. We also looked at some of the art; we looked at the landscape and we went on fjords, we went on steamers, we went on little railways over the mountains, but crucially we walked. We walked up the mountains through the narrow strips of agricultural land, through the woods and the forests and beyond the tree line, right up, up, up and that was an important moment, because Brand is a play in which the landscape fulfils a rather important function. The mountains, and the very thin strip of land upon which people mostly live, and the very deep fjords - those are the physical locations of the drama but they're also the emblems that Ibsen uses, the iconography of the play. So the climbing of the mountain, interacting with that landscape if you like, is absolutely crucial in this play, more so than in any of Ibsen's other work (until we get to the very end of his life to When We Dead Awaken, when again going right up into the highest peaks becomes absolutely vital to that play). So that experience in Norway gave us a wonderful advantage, a wonderful way of being able to relate to the landscape in the way the characters do.
To design a set for this play is obviously problematic. How are you planning to get round this?
Adrian Noble:
Well, the play offers wonderful opportunities to the director, the designer and the company of actors. It represented a departure from the past for Ibsen, and the past for him was a naturalistic form of theatre that was pretty realistic, ie if you're up a mountain, we want to see the mountain. If you're in a boat, we want to see the boat, if you're in a cave we want to see the cave, which of course is not the way that, say, Shakespeare wrote. This is why one finds a freedom in working with Shakespeare that one doesn't find with Oscar Wilde for example. Ibsen wrote this play as a poem and therefore didn't feel he had to obey the rather stifling, claustrophobic rules of mid 19th century Norwegian theatre.
This inevitably pitches the emphasis onto the spoken word and off the image. Peter McKintosh (the designer) and I really took this on board and said we didn't want to represent a series of naturalistic locations, (nor could we have done), so we created a landscape that had height and somehow it had depth as well, including a very reflective floor that could seem 'infinite' - so the stage can represent up a mountain, on the mountain, below a mountain, on the fjord - wherever we'd like it to be. It can also move in a liquid way between any of these worlds because it's a very simple, un naturalistic set and therefore it throws the emphasis onto the actor who in turn, of course, throws the emphasis onto the word. I think therefore we've found quite an authentic way into the play, but also at one and the same time a very creative way into the play.
You have directed several of Ibsen's plays. What is it about his work that seems so timeless and consistently popular?
Adrian Noble:
Ibsen is unlike other playwrights because his drama progresses in a series of moral dilemmas. He has a unique ability to shape his drama accordingly. Chekhov doesn't do that at all - most of his work comes out of people in certain situations. Ibsen's comes out of people in a moral situation. This means that you can create something that through almost every single moment of the drama there is the potential to engage the audience in a very particular way. If you're not looking at decoration or following narrative, you're watching and focusing on something that's really quite like life or death, particularly if you can engage with the characters. That's something I find extraordinarily exciting to work on as a director and I think that audiences will enjoy that as well.