BRAND


By Mark Shenton
Sunday Express
June 8, 2003

It seems that fame and hope come before experience in the West End nowadays, with TV actors such as Matthew Perry currently appearing on stage for the 1st time since he was 17 and in high school, so it's a relief to welcome back stars such as Ralph Fiennes and Kenneth Branagh who started off working in the theatre and keep returning to it .... (cut piece about Kenneth Branagh)

Not that Fiennes likes to make it easy. Like his explorer cousin Ranulph, Ralph likes to climb mountains: literally as well and figuratively in the case of Brand, a rarely-seen Ibsen play about a priest whose spiritual journey of disillusioned faith finds him pursued up a mountain by villagers who have lost faith in him.

It's an uphill struggle, both for him and for us, as we follow him on his theological wanderings and he asks, "Is man defeated after all?" I certainly felt defeated by this play.

When the Norwegian playwright wrote this early work at the age of 37, he never intended it to be performed on a stage, conceiving it instead as an epic, dramatic poem.

Director Adrian Noble - leaving the flying car of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and now the RSC behind him - has fortunately more than halved the six-and-a-half-hour running time of the original Swedish production.

Fiennes brings a commanding authority to it and Claire Price plays his wife with an anxious beauty, but it's still and demanding play with which it is difficult to engage.



 

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