Brand


By Benedict Nightingale
The Times
June, 2003





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Be reassured. When Ibsen's Brand was first staged in 1885, it ran to more than six hours and reportedly left "such ladies as survived to the end dozing on their escorts' shoulders with their corsets and bodices unbuttoned". Thankfully, Adrian Noble's valedictory production for the RSC lasts a manageable 165 minutes.

Be doubly reassured. Brand himself is played by Ralph Fiennes, and anybody who recently saw his Jung in Christopher Hampton's Talking Cure will know that he is far more than a movie star with an elegant profile and speaking voice.


The playwright had the idea for Brand when he went to St Peter’s in Rome, and this is a great cathedral of a play. “All or nothing” is the cry of the main character, a preacher who gives up everything and sees his wife and child die for his beliefs, only to discover that love and not duty is the world’s ruling purpose.

The piece was originally seen in Scandinavia as an attack on everything conventional, smug and second rate. Now I suspect we shall find a new meaning in it. Think fundamentalist Muslims and Christians. Think absolutist sects and cults. Think of the scary wrong headedness that sometimes accompanies faith and integrity. You have just thought of the play that Ibsen wrote more than a century ago.









 

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