Power Without The Glory


By John Peter
The Sunday Times
June 8, 2003

In Adrian Noble’s hands, Ibsen’s Brand has become a gripping study of a self-deluded leader says John Peter



The first thing you notice about Ralph Fiennes is his eerie calm. Ibsen’s Brand (Haymarket) is, among other things, about fanaticism, and we think of fanatics as driven, highly strung, always on the edge of an explosion. But Fiennes knows, I think, that the quiet fanatic is as dangerous as, if not more than, the volatile kind, and he gives Brand, at least at first, an air of quiet confidence. His wiry body, bent very slightly forward, speaks of a determination untroubled by doubt, but it also suggests the carrying of a great burden. I fight and struggle, it says, but not for myself. Follow me, do as I say, I am one who knows. I will sacrifice myself if need be, to bring you to your God. Brand, a Lutheran pastor, is almost saying that he is, like Jesus, the way, the truth and the life. If this play is a tragedy, it is partly a tragedy of blasphemy.

Brand was not written to be performed, and the miraculous thing about Adrian Noble’s production is that he brings out the drama of the play without pretending that it is conventionally theatrical. Peter McKintosh’s tall wooden cyclorama, with a few basic props and with mists whirling behind it, turns the stage into a battleground of the spirit. Sometimes the centre opens to admit characters who have the primitive vigour and resonance of medieval religious plays. The mayor (Oliver Cotton), Brand’s mother (Susan Engel), the provost (Alan David), all represent types of humanity more than real people, and it is the actors’ skill and intelligence, treading the tightrope between allegory and life, that makes them human. Brand, calm but passionate, urges them relentlessly toward salvation.

Like all true tragic heroes, Brand understands things only gradually, and Fiennes maps his progress like a master. This is a haunting, rocklike performance, but Fiennes has grasped the central point about Brand, which is that he is like a rock that cracks because of its own unyielding hardness and rigidity.

Brand is a priest, but one who behaves like a combination of a miracle worker, a military leader and a saviour. He comes barging into people’s lives, like Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, to cure their sickness by the ruthless application of truths, and regardless, or unaware, of any collateral damage. It is no good telling him, as the mayor does, that he’s interested only in the salvation of Man, not of men: Brand cannot see any difference between the general and the particular. Like all fanatics, he is a totalitarian: there is only one way, my way, because my way is His way.

Brand’s religion is driven by will, not love. His God only takes, never gives. Brand really, genuinely, wants to lead people to him; but you begin to suspect that, for him, one of God’s functions is to justify the ways of Brand to man. “Where’s God,” he demands, “humane towards Christ?” The point here is not only that Brand is getting, morally, above his station, but also that he is in a deep theo-logical muddle. He does not seem to understand Christ’s divinity, his oneness with God the Father or his willingness to compromise. Christ, you could say, brought compromise into Judaism. What are his miracles (all right, I’ll show you that I’m divine), or his forgiveness of sinners, but acts of healing and constructive moral compromise? Christ is the great absentee character in this play; and Brand’s tragedy is that he has made himself into a spokesman of a God he has created for himself.

One of Fiennes’s and Noble’s great achievements is that they do not make Brand either ridiculous or repulsive. Goodness knows, his terrible moral pedantry exposes him to both, and there are just one or two moments in the second half when his unyielding bigotry makes you feel unsure whether to laugh or to cry. But then, being a modern person, you realise that the grotesque is an aspect of the totalitarian, the hardline fundamentalist: his demented insistence on which books to read, which music to like or the way to cut your hair.

One of the great and terrible moments in the play is when Brand’s wife, Agnes, is made to give away her dead child’s clothes, even his christening robes, to a needy, angry Gypsy woman. Agnes is one of the most difficult roles in all Ibsen, and Claire Price brings out both her sensual womanliness and the inner fervour, the sense of deep spiritual kinship she herself barely understands, that drives her to Brand. Price’s Agnes glows with the strong, warm, reasoning humanity Brand so badly needs. This is a serious, beautiful performance, full of love and pain and deep emotional intelligence, and it marks Price out as one of the finest talents of her generation.

All true tragedies end in a sense of recognition. Brand, too, realises that he is lost. Like all defeated totalitarians, he feels betrayed by the people he had led; but then he has also to take on board the futility of his whole moral enterprise. Why should people have followed him? Where exactly had he been leading them? What fight? What victory? The shrill military language of totalitarians is a hollow and dangerous metaphor. Part of Brand’s tragedy is that he finally understands this.

God, he is told, is the God of love, not the God of tyrannical intolerance. The play is a great, dour, wise parable. Brand the man is the late-Romantic artist who sacrifices his humanity to his work; the moral elitist who despises his flock; and the self- deluded leader who uses the wrong map to lead his people. Brand the play is both a monumentally old-fashioned parable and a thrillingly modern one, and to have brought it to the West End is a huge achievement.




 

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