Brand


By Georgina Brown
The Mail On Sunday
June 8, 2003




I wonder what the collective noun is for several plays by the Norwegian playwright Henrich Ibsen? A storm? A gloom? It would have to do with appalling weather, which plays a major role in all his works.

Whatever, London is in the middle of one right now. A marvellous production of The Lady From the Sea opened the new Almeida; a potent The Dance of Death can be seen in Shaftesbury Avenue; The Master Builder is on its way with Patrick Stewart and Sue Johnston in mid-June; and one of his most demanding plays, Brand, has just opened in the West End, with Ralph Fiennes in the title role.

It's a tough one. Brand is a Lutheran pastor, not that you'd guess it from his lack of compassion, human sympathy and uncompromising hard shell. A fanatical idealist, an extraordinary, extreme individual, as chilly and as unfathomably deep as a Norwegian fjord, he will allow nothing, not his dying mother nor his sickly son, to stand between him and his single-minded mission.

Brand is not so much a person as an embodiment of an idea, the ruthless moral will to serve the great master, God, or, at least, Brand's idea of God.

Like a recovering alcoholic, he deserves your respect, but his born-again sobriety and evangelism is such an all-consuming obsession that it is hard to find the human being behind it.

The first half of Adrian Noble's production is heavy going, a long climb in semi-darkness that somehow keeps finishing up in the same rut: Brand's rant that all or nothing is the only way.

But as his journey continues and he comes up against the flaky hypocrites, the local mayor and another clergyman - who always finds a reason to compromise - his lonely path becomes increasingly courageous and more involving. And the coup de theatre, when it comes - an avalanche - is breathtaking.

Fiennes is technically magnificent, but his performance often strikes you as being a self-conscious masterclass in fine acting. He is all icy-cold intensity, supreme arrogance, charismatic, certainly, and deeply disturbing, but too controlled. It is Clare Price's astonishing, radiant performance as his obedient wife Agnes that touches us.

Forbidden to grieve for her baby (Brand turns his back on her and reads the Bible), forbidden to open the shutters, forced to give away her baby's clothes to a gipsy woman, she loses her mind.

Had Fiennes's Brand wept too, he would have conquered Ibsen's most ambitious, but perhaps unscaleable, peak.





 

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