Ralph Fiennes Is Uptight In Early Ibsen


By Susannah Clapp
The Observer
June 8, 2003

For once, the West End, usually sclerotic with pap, looks more adventurous, though not exactly more fun, than the South Bank. You have to be bold to stage Brand. Ibsen's play - written in 1865, more than a decade before The Doll's House and 20 years earlier than Hedda Gabler -- was never intended to be acted. It's a poem. It contains a child of nature who comes on babbling about trolls. And its protagonist is a figure of adamantine resolution, far removed from the Third Way or the New Age: Brand founds his faith as a priest, and his personality, on lack of compro mise - he demands from his flock and his family total renunciation, not only of worldly goods but of tender feelings. It's a perilous play, sometimes absurd and sometimes repellent. And yet, grandly sculpted, carved with unforgettable chiaroscuro images - lowering mountains, candlelight, gathering darkness, a cathedral of snow - it has magnificence as well as intensity. It is completely itself. Adrian Noble's production - his swansong for the RSC - is alive with this sense.

Peter McKintosh's beautiful abstract design is lofty, unyielding. High timber boards shift through a chic Scandinavian palette under Peter Mumford's lighting - changing from slate to watery greens and ice blues; a tall black fissure opens like a fjord. In a marvellous final coup, when an avalanche sweeps down and engulfs Brand's fixed conviction, the whole hard set disappears into a cloud of white mist. Norwegian wood dissolves along with Norwegian will.

The first performance of Brand lasted for six and a half hours: women unlaced their corsets in order to last it out. No need for that here: Noble's production is brisk but not hurried. Claire Price as the high-minded but (this is Ibsen after all) outrageously submissive wife, is shining and tremulous: a bleak domestic exchange in which she and her husband catch the fear in each other's eyes is the best in the production. Susan Engel, in the smaller but crucial part of Brand's mother, dispenses a chill with her habitual grace.

As Brand, Ralph Fiennes is saturnine and taut. Cramped with misery, he forcefully suggests a character propelled by disgust at everyone else's fudging. He moves warily; he shoots suspicious looks; he seems to despise the words that fall with reluctant slowness and staccato emphases from his mouth, as if unable to bear looking at anyone else on the stage; he directs his speeches to an empyrean realm over the heads of the audience. At his most driven, he gets a Richard III lope. It's a detailed, intelligent interpretation. But it's too careful, too rational, too contained for this craggy play. What he doesn't show is someone impelled by an idealism that might justify his sacrifices, if only to himself. Brand should burn.

 

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