May 11, 2003 Sunday Times- Thanks to Mickledore for contributing text and image.

THERE'S JUST NO STOPPING HIM
Ralph Fiennes devotes everything to his work — which makes him perfect for the role of the fanatical Brand, says Aleks Sirez

Ralph Fiennes has taken on the title role of Henrik Ibsen’s Brand. For anyone who hasn’t seen the play, it’s hard to convey the epic quality of this undertaking. Fiennes is onstage for almost three hours, talking all the time, and he has to make a religious fanatic, who sacrifices mother, wife and child to his mission, not only compelling but moving too. Yes, Brand’s up there with Hamlet, Lear and Peer Gynt. It is a role only the best actor of his generation is asked to perform.

After a short run in Stratford- upon-Avon, 40-year-old Fiennes is bringing Brand to the West End. In the play’s last scene, the outcast priest is mistaken for Jesus Christ by a deluded madwoman. Here, Fiennes’s Brand radiates holiness. You can almost see the halo. Maybe his next role should be Jesus. “Oh, I’ve already played the voice of Jesus,” he smiles. “I had this funny year in which I did two animated films: in one, I was the voice of Pharaoh, in the other, called The Miracle Maker, I was the son of God.”

Playing Jesus must be an ego boost, but when I meet him in Stratford, he is surprisingly diffident. The heart-throb Hollywood star doesn’t strut, preen or pose. He sits slightly hunched, a bit tense, the famous tiger eyes darting around the room. Only his expensive clothes signal his stardom: classy black shirt, slightly flared trousers and some fancy shoes.

Fiennes maintains that while Brand is “not an easy play, it is an extraordinary experience”. But surely the character is as chilly as a Norwegian fjord? “Yes, I suppose so,” he says, “but I find that when he’s inspired at the very end, he senses that God is in everything — that’s him at his best.” To illustrate his point, Fiennes mentions Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey. Then he adds: “I also think that Brand’s ruthlessness comes from how he grew up: ‘I grew up alone, like one of the stones on the shore.’ He’s been dominated by his mother and his sense of love is completely upside down. He distrusts love. He is a damaged child who has this mission.”

Although audiences have warmed to him, Fiennes has worried about the show. “It’s a very dangerous role; you can easily slip into melodrama.” Watching his Brand, the puritan preacher is less in evidence than the modernist outsider. His body language reminds me of the angular figures in Van Gogh’s early paintings; his attitude is more Kafka and Dostoevsky than Scandinavian cleric. “Oh, good,” he says. “Brand is a religious existentialist. He’s an outsider finding his way.” Fiennes goes on to talk about Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead. “There’s a wonderful bit when the prisoners put on a play, and they are all transformed, which is a powerful validation of the theatre.” But his enthusiasm suddenly stalls: “The last time I talked overearnestly about what theatre at its best can do, I was called pretentious.”

His interest in religion is not confined to Brand. “I was brought up,” he says, “by a pretty devout Catholic mother (the novelist Jennifer Lash, who died in 1993). My family — particularly on her side — is full of religious people.” A professor of theology rubs shoulders with a Benedictine monk and a Greek patriarch. “God was being discussed all the time, in a very unembarrassed way.”

The eldest of her six children, Ralph was born in Suffolk. At 13, he stopped going to church. “My mother was very upset,” he says. “She’d tried to make going to church a constructive and celebratory experience. But I didn’t buy into it.” As a teenager, Fiennes went through a phase of wanting to join the army, but settled on the Chelsea School of Art. “The foundation course was designed to throw ideas at you, mess up your preconceptions — that gave me the confidence to recognise that I really wanted to be an actor. I joined an amateur company and auditioned for Rada.” His parents encouraged him.

His mother was less proud of his success than of his complete integrity and depth of commitment. Fiennes has said, “I do judge other women by her”, pointing out that her emotional intensity could be both overpowering and exciting. In 1988, he joined the RSC, where Adrian Noble (who directs Brand as his last act as company supremo) recalls him giving “one of the three best auditions I’ve ever seen”. It was for Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, a role he went on to play, as did his brother Joseph recently at the National.

After his big-screen debut, a brooding Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1992), came films full of moody introspection, tortured soul-searching and enigmatic loneliness. As well as Schindler’s List and The English Patient, he starred in Quiz Show, Onegin and The End of the Affair. Recently, he has played a schizophrenic in Spider and a serial killer in Red Dragon. Beneath the perfect smile lies a world of pain. His attempts to play light comedy — in The Avengers and in Maid in Manhattan, with J.Lo — have been unconvincing. Onstage, his most memorable parts have been Shakespeare’s Richard II and Coriolanus, while his baleful Hamlet won a Tony on Broadway in 1995.

His reputation for aloofness and arrogance is not borne out when you meet him — just as long as you talk about his work. Yes, he’s serious, but he’s also warm and willing to grapple with big subjects such as spirituality. Clearly, he likes roles that stretch him. “As an actor, your challenge is to get your mind around the psychology of another human being — and the more complex and contradictory the character, the more dramatic that is.”

He continues: “There’s a bit of Brand in repellent characters like Hitler, and there’s a bit of him in Blake and Wordsworth.” Talking of his role as a Nazi in Schindler’s List, he says quietly: “The human capacity to do evil is very disturbing. You have to confront certain things; the bit of you that might go there.” We talk about Michael Meyer’s biography of Ibsen: “Ibsen clearly felt some of the anger Brand feels. He loathed compromise, while being a loyal husband and affectionate father.”

Fiennes is attracted by the notion of sacrifice, “about having to go through something to get somewhere”. “You have to lose something to gain something. You have to go down before you can go up. Brand is too extreme for me, but I do think that being prepared to give up things is an issue.”

He’s never had any children, and I wonder whether he’s alluding to that. “Brand makes me ask: have I given up enough? What am I doing this for? Is what I do going to make things better or not?” He gives me a haunted glance before wrestling with “that Catholic bit that asks: what is the account at the end of the day? In your daily life, where’s your ounce of courage to face things truthfully?”.

We’re getting on well, then I ask about his private life. He gives me a hangdog look. “I’m very reluctant to say anything, I really am.” Since 1995, he’s been living with Francesca Annis, who played Gertrude to his Hamlet, which encouraged gossips to say he’s sleeping with his mother — she’s 18 years older than him. “I so know I didn’t marry my mother,” he once told an interviewer. “I started off finding it insulting, but now I find it stupid.”

In fact, what’s interesting is not Annis’s age but her job. Like Alex Kingston — whom Fiennes met at Rada, then married in 1993, before they broke up a year later — Annis is an actress. What Fiennes needs is not a mother but a loyal partner who understands what acting’s all about. Annis has seen his Brand and given him some suggestions.

“There is an understanding,” he says, “that if you’re going in front of an audience, you have to have your confidence intact. As an actor, you only give support. Once, I had a taste of losing confidence, and there’s nothing worse. It was when I was very young — suddenly, during a production, my confidence about my talent, my sense of cohesion, suddenly all went. It’s very fragile. More fragile than you might think.” The haunted look returns and reminds me that, like other great actors, Fiennes is doing us a favour. He puts himself through hell so that the audience can get an insight into being human. Like Brand, he is a man with a mission.

Brand opens at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1, on June 4

The Independent- Thanks to Freya for contributing the text, Mickledore for the photos
`I like to play tortured souls'.
By BRIAN VINER.
12 May 2003

In person, Ralph Fiennes is charming, easy-going and every inch the perfect English gentleman. But put him on stage and it's all hellfire,

The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Row F. It is 7.32pm on a balmy evening in May. Ralph Fiennes is making his entrance in the Ibsen play, Brand, and a middle-aged woman, who has previously been relaxedly chatting to her neighbour, sits forward and visibly stiffens. She remains like this until the interval, when she becomes sufficiently limp to consume a tub of strawberry ice cream. But when the lights go down for Act II, she stiffens again, as though electrified.
There are several possible explanations for this.

One: she is a fan of the comedian Jo Brand, and thought that a show called Brand would be a one-woman performance of jokes about premenstrual tension and what bastards men are.

Two: she is an Ibsen devotee.

Three: she is a Ralph Fiennes devotee. As keen as I am to entertain the first possibility, the second or third, or a combination of the two, seem more likely. Not that Fiennes is at his dishiest as Brand, the fiercely moralistic Lutheran pastor. It is not a dishy part. But he is very, very good in it.

Across the road from the Swan Theatre, in the Royal Shakespeare Company press office. It is 5.30pm several days later, and Fiennes, slighter than he appears on stage and screen, is sitting opposite me in a small room. Having interviewed lots of actors, I, of course, know better than to confuse the frankly terrifying Brand with Fiennes himself, but, all the same, it comes as a surprise, especially knowing that the metamorphosis is just a couple of hours away, to find an engagingly gentle, genial sort of chap.

I tell him that I have read him quoted in a previous interview as saying that unlike some actors, he does not "take his characters home".

As he has recently played a schizophrenic in the David Cronenberg film Spider, and a cannibalistic serial killer in the film Red Dragon, to say nothing of Brand, this, I venture, is just as well.

He smiles. "Well, no, I'm not Brand 24 hours a day. But I do think a lot about the parts I play while I'm scrambling eggs. And I am preoccupied with this one, which is a huge part. The danger of it is that he could become a ranting, finger-wagging pedagogue. I have tried to find a sense of vulnerability."

We'll come back to Brand, a little-performed but intriguing play, written in 1865 and provoked, in part, by Ibsen's anger at the failure of Norway and Sweden to support Denmark in its 1864 war with Germany over Schleswig-Holstein. But first things first. Biting the face of a tabloid journalist, as his character did in Red Dragon... was it satisfying?

After all, the tabloids took a prurient delight in his affair with the actress Francesca Annis, which finished off his marriage to the actress Alex Kingston, their interest further inflamed by the fact that Annis is 18 years his senior and that they met when she played his mother - Gertrude to his Hamlet. Moreover, tabloid speculation has dogged him since, most recently when he was seen dining with Jennifer Lopez, his co-star in Maid in Manhattan. He must have sometimes felt like, if not biting their faces off, at least punching their lights out?

"Well, actually no, I didn't find it satisfying. It was an unpleasant scene, and Philip Seymour Hoffman [who played the luckless hack] was so brilliant at being terrified. But I do despise the tabloid press, I really do, both here and in New York, although the British tabloids were particularly unpleasant when my relationship with Francesca became public six or seven years ago.

"But, of course, I don't get nearly as much attention as some, the Beckhams, for example. And these things pass. Really, the worst thing to do is get defensive or self-justifying, because it only serves their purposes. The thing to do is to treat them with contempt and move on, because there are more important things... and it's only one's vanity and ego that's been affected. I might read something I don't like, but then I find that other people haven't even read it. I pick up the phone to one of my brothers or sisters and say, `I'm really upset about this', and they say, `What's that? I haven't read it'."

Fiennes, 40, is the eldest of six. Martha is a film and video director, Magnus a composer, Sophie a photographer, Joseph an actor (best known for playing the title role in Shakespeare In Love), and Jacob a gamekeeper. Their father Mark is a photographer, and their late mother Jini was a painter, novelist and travel writer. A cousin, Sir Ranulph, is an explorer. They are quite a bunch, and yet frightfully English and middle class about it all, at least if Ralph - pronounced in the old English way, of course, to rhyme with "chafe" - is anything to go by.

The sheer Englishness of him is ironic when you consider that his most celebrated performances, on screen at any rate, have been as foreigners: the Hungarian Count Laszlo de Almasy in The English Patient; the American patrician Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show; and the monstrous commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's List, the 1993 film that propelled him to an Oscar nomination and stardom.

I ask him whether he was worried, when Schindler's List was released, that his life was about to change.

"I was actually very naive about it. I knew that a Spielberg film would have an enormous public profile, but it was a very strange time, because the success of the film coincided with the death of my mother. It was a time of distress and grief, and then there was this other thing happening, the Oscar buzz. Quite disorienting."
Although very ill, Jini Fiennes lived to see Schindler's List, and perhaps died knowing that her eldest child, already a whizz with the RSC, was on the verge of becoming a movie star. Not that it would have mattered to her. By all accounts, it was effort rather than achievement that she tried to foster in her children: "Put your guts into it," was her constant refrain, however trivial the exercise.

She would be proud of his performance in Brand, to which he commits both his guts and his soul. I ask him whether he is religious. "No, no, I'm not a practising anything. But my mother's side of the family includes priests and professors of theology, so I grew up with God being a subject that no one was frightened to talk about, even if they didn't believe in him.

"My mother's uncle is a Benedictine monk, actually, and a theologian and a poet. He's called Sebastian Moore, and is quite well known, and gives wonderful sermons at christenings, weddings and funerals. He's unpredictable, cutting-edge. I'm dying for him to see this."

During the rehearsals for Brand, another theologian was drafted in to talk Lutheranism to the cast. But Fiennes used the biography of Ibsen by Michael Meyer (whose translation this production uses) as his main source of reference.

"And I came to realise that Brand really is a version of Ibsen, repressed, but with huge compassion under this taut, not instinctively generous nature. Brand gives these big speeches, and Ibsen did that, too, but in his cups, late at night. He certainly felt great anger over Schleswig-Holstein."

Can he relate to that, I wonder. I can't imagine that he was gung-ho for the invasion of Iraq. Does he perhaps feel betrayed by the leader of his country, as Ibsen did?

A long pause. "I have never," he says, "felt so unnerved by anything as I did by this war. I found it very unsettling. I don't trust President Bush, and I'm very disappointed in Tony Blair. But I'm very wary about exploiting my public profile for political reasons. I vote - I have voted twice for Labour - but I'm not an overtly political animal."

Another pause. "I was making Spider on September 11, shooting in Toronto, and my immediate response was, yes, it's appalling, yes, something must be done, but why are these people this angry? Why are people suicide bombers? We must stop them, of course, but why do they do it?"

Maybe, I suggest, this is the actor in him, needing to find the deep-seated motivation for a character's terrible actions?

"Yes, in Schindler's List, I had to know why men were like this." Here, Fiennes grits his lovely white teeth and narrows his lovely blue eyes. It's a fleeting but slightly scary change of demeanour. "Why did they join the SS in the 1930s? Because of their anger, their huge anger at their country's emasculation, their huge sense of humiliation... not that I'm justifying or condoning it, of course not."

Of course not. In the meantime, we have reached one of The Questions. There are two questions contained in virtually all interviews with Fiennes, and he doesn't like either of them, and one of them I'm not going to bother with. That's the one about the age difference between him and Annis and whether it ever gives him pause for thought (it doesn't).

The other is the one about tortured souls. So, here goes: so many of his characters exhibit signs of inner torment... is he particularly drawn to those parts, and if so, why? He sighs. "This terrible label, `tortured souls'. I think most people are wrestling with something... it's really about dramatising the choices we're all making, but pushed to a greater level to make them drama. I like to play tortured souls with a sense of purpose, like Oscar in Oscar and Lucinda, this quirky priest with a peculiar inner conviction. That's why I was drawn to Brand, because he has this extraordinary vision that, at its best, inspires people."

The actor Simon Russell Beale once said of Fiennes that, more than most in their profession, he seems to sense the importance of acting. I don't want to back him into Pseud's Corner, but does he think that there is some truth in that?

"Well, I like to feel the energy behind what people do, whether they are architects, painters, or other actors. What inspired me to act was seeing Paul Scofield playing Salieri in the play Amadeus. I felt that thing of the goose bumps, you know. And it happened again when I saw Judi Dench as Cleopatra.

"As a punter, I love it when one's imagination is deeply affected, and in Brand, it's wonderful to feel on some nights that we have taken the audience on a journey. I don't know how important that is, but it's wonderful that some people come out feeling terribly moved... and I guess some people come out feeling nothing."

It must have been gratifying, I add, that his youthful inspiration, Paul Scofield, wound up playing his father in Quiz Show. "Oh, I couldn't believe it. He was cast quite late on, after we had started filming, and I couldn't believe it. My mother had gone to the theatre a lot, and spoken to me a lot about Scofield, and I had seen him as King Lear, and in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the National Theatre." Did he tell the great man of his admiration? "I think I did, actually, rather sheepishly."

It is not hard to think of Fiennes being sheepish; a slight reticence is part of his considerable charm. He admits as much when I ask how much direction matters to him. "I am not good at confrontation," he says, "so I have to feel there is a common view. I had a huge sense of collaboration with [director] Adrian Noble on this... but at other times, I have felt frustration with directors. Music is one of my bugbears, the overlaying of too much music. I felt that slightly in [the 1999 Neil Jordan film] The End of the Affair. It was very exciting music by Michael Nyman, but sometimes overly insistent."

As we part, and he wanders across the road to get into character as Brand, I recall that The End of the Affair was also the film that fell foul of the censor on account of the Fiennes bottom doing some overly insistent pumping. I wonder what Henrik Ibsen would have made of that. But I think I can guess the response of the woman from Row F.

`Brand' continues at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, to 24 May (0870 609 1110), and transfers to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London on 30 May.

From the RSC website:
Ralph Fiennes on Brand

Can you say a bit about why you wanted to play what is often seen as a very difficult and unsympathetic character?

Ralph Fiennes:
He is at face value quite unsympathetic but that's too simple a judgement. Brand is a tough nut to crack as a character because Ibsen has written a very extreme man who has a hard and often really tough and merciless commitment to his Christian faith but I found that there was a poetry and an epic quality in the play that I liked. The ideas really appealed to me - just to do with life and faith and the way you live your life. Brand's brand of faith is very tough but there are moments in the play when you can be inspired by how he expresses his belief. At other times you could be repelled by it.

He is a man who is trying to articulate his beliefs not just through language but through the way he lives his life. When I read the play, I thought that Brand had similarities to Coriolanus who is often thought of as a difficult, unlikeable and unsympathetic protagonist.

I think that Ibsen deliberately confronted us with this very extreme intellect and spirit but, as his wife says about him, "a deep well of love exists in this man" and you do see moments of huge compassion in him. Ibsen sets up his psychological background very astutely because it is clear that Brand was unloved by his parents and is distrustful of the world. He says: "What the world calls love I neither know nor want" but just before saying that he has admitted that the love of his wife is one of the best things that has come into his life. So he is suppressing his own compassion and humanity all the time and for me that makes him tragic.

When was your last season at the RSC and what did you take away from it?

Ralph Fiennes:
1990-91 when I played Troilus, Edmund the Bastard in King Lear and Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost. In my first season (1988-9), when I played Henry VI in the Plantagenets series, I felt very connected to the character of Henry.

When did you last work with Adrian Noble and why do you like working with him as a director?

Ralph Fiennes:
I met Adrian when we worked together on The Plantagenets. He cast me as Henry VI, also a very devout man but completely different from Brand, lacking any of his anger. Brand has a warlike temperament. His wife says "Your god is a warrior god" and Brand talks about waging war - not a war in which he is killing people but a war of idealism, of belief.

Adrian and I connected very well on The Plantaganets and I remember that I felt that he allows you the space in which to make mistakes, to experiment, to get your hands dirty. He gives you a lot of rope which can sometimes be quite scary because he leaves it up to you to find your way. Other directors can be much more on top of you. Adrian seems very laid back but then suddenly he is there, shaping and tailoring. So you feel in safe hands and that the production is supporting you and then you can take risks. And although not everything you try works, something good can come out of it.

Did you take away anything useful from your research trip to Norway with Adrian Noble last year?

Ralph Fiennes:
I really wanted to go to Norway to see the landscape. Ibsen describes the mountains, fjords and valleys. I wanted to look down a fjord and see what Ibsen describes. We went on a long hike up a mountain, above a fjord, and suddenly had that sense of elation that a mountain can bring out of you. It is easy to be inspired by the height of the mountains in Norway but also humbled. At the same time as you are lifted and exalted, you are made to feel that you are nothing. Edmund Hillary said something similar when talking about why he climbed mountains - he said that he felt "called" up a mountain It gives you a sense of perspective about the world which is one of the first things that struck me when I read the play.

We recognised Ibsen's description of walking up to the heavens and of looking down to the houses below and seeing human habitation and ordinary, everyday life. We had wonderful weather, clear blue skies and we could see for miles. Brand talks about being up in the mountain or of going down to the valley, which he is reluctant to do, and he also talks about valleys that don't get any sun and you could certainly see sides of mountains that probably got very little light at all because they were completely north facing. Brand chooses to live in a house that gets no sun, no light. And when you can imagine where that sort of house can be, it's very daunting. It's also very useful to be able to carry a physical memory of what it is like to have walked those very long distances. Things which one could have imagined but since we had the time to visit, we went and I do feel it made a difference. I feel that I hold those images in my head. There is no scenery as such in our play - the mountains are in the imaginations of the actors so to have seen it so that the image is really strong in my mind is very helpful.

Are you doing any other preparation, physical or mental, for the role?

Ralph Fiennes:
Keep fit - learn the lines.

What memories will it bring back, spending time in Stratford?

Ralph Fiennes:
Being tired, being exhilarated by the work, sometimes frustrated if you felt you weren't giving of your best or hadn't cracked the part.

One of the things I always liked was the thrill of hearing an audience respond at the end of a performance of a Shakespeare play. Everyone is always questioning Shakespeare's place in our lives - should he be on school syllabuses, is he any use, is he redundant, what's the point of him today? But in performance, suddenly there is a connection to a modern audience. They have gone on a journey. They won't have understood all the words but they will have understood the fundamental drama and characters will have come through. Shakespeare is contemporary - not always linguistically but in the things he addresses and I do remember feeling the thrill that this great language was still connecting to audiences in a contemporary context.

How do you think a serious, classic play like BRAND will go down with the West End audiences?

Ralph Fiennes:
For many people, I suppose, Ibsen is demanding drama but a lot of people are hungry for that. I have faith in the audiences that want to be challenged, to engage in ideas. BRAND has no song and dance numbers but it is not a dry, intellectual piece. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think it has huge dramatic power and I think it's the production's job to unlock that. Certainly the part of Brand, on the page, is a very dramatic figure. And the text is very accessible. It deals with issues of faith and I do think that you cannot fail to be affected by the Christ story. Ibsen said that Brand could have been an architect or a politician. It's simply about a man of vision, a passionate, burning vision which takes no prisoners but is also inspiring and I think that if that visionary quality of Brand can come through and the audience takes that journey with him then the play will connect.

They have to be alert to Brand's faults and to the resistible things that he says and does but he is a human being struggling to make people .... better, I suppose. What Ibsen couldn't bear in his countrymen was any sense of slothfulness or lack of commitment to a vision or a way of life. In one of Brand's speeches he says "It isn't love of pleasure that is destroying us, it would be better if it were. Enjoy yourself if you will, but be consistent, do it all the time. Not one thing one day and another the next". Brand loathes what he calls compromise - a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He thinks it neuters you and apparently Ibsen was a quiet self-contained man who, when he had had a bit to drink, would suddenly come out with these very strong, very hard points of view. He apparently said "Brand is me in my best moments" and I think that Ibsen thought that his best moments were when he was being an angry man at the dinner table late at night with a couple of bottles of wine inside him. But people did say he was mesmeric. He would suddenly come through with great passion.

There's a bit of Brand in repellent characters like Hitler and then there is a bit of him in William Blake or Wordsworth - this vision of the total unity of man and his world and an ecstasy which is joyful, the going towards the light. I hope that audiences will respond to those visionary and inspirational qualities in Brand. But then there is the other side of Brand which pushes people to risk their lives and demands extreme things of people. One of the key things in the play is the notion of sacrifice. Brand says: "If you give all you have but not your life, you give nothing".

Brand runs in the Swan Theatre in Stratford upon Avon from 18 April - 24 May, transferring into the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London from 29 May - 30 August 2003.

First Review from Coventry News- Thanks Mickledore

Review: Brand.
May 2 2003

By Marion McMullen

A rare chance to see Ralph Fiennes at his tortured best on the Warwickshire stage is not to be missed.

Audiences have been heading to Stratford and happily sitting through nearly three hours of Ibsen to see Fiennes in fine form as restless and driven priest Brand.

Few actors could do justice to the part of the man of God who is prepared to sacrifice everything for his calling.

His mother, his wife and his son all take second place in his drive to save souls and find spiritual peace.

Fiennes is a real firebrand as Brand. He is intense and passionate as a man who refuses to compromise his beliefs and demands that others around him follow his example.

Brand is a hard act to follow, however, and his neighbours often fail to meet his high standards.

Fiennes finds the conflict at the heart of Brand and presents a restless soul instead of merely a religious monster. Claire Price is deeply moving as Brand’s wife, Agnes, while Susan Engel cuts an understanding figure as the other woman in his life, his money-loving mum.

But there’s little chance to Rest In Peace with Brand around.

BRAND - Swan Theatre, Stratford, running time 2hr 45min, until May 24.

Ralph's Brand new role May 2 2003

By Marion McMullen

The eyes that sent Jennifer Lopez weak at the knees in Hollywood movie Maid in Manhattan are alight with passion.

But it’s not J-Lo’s famous backside that is the cause of the spark. British leading man Ralph Fiennes is back on the Warwickshire stage after more than 13 years and he is consumed by the acting challenge of playing the title role in Ibsen’s Brand.

“I had a gut instinct to the role when I read the play,” he explains. “I don’t take a part thinking ‘will this show how versatile I am?’ It’s a gut response, an instinctive thing.”

Ralph was not familiar initially with the play about a devout and driven priest, but it has given him a taste to do more Ibsen and he describes Brand as a “powerful and complex man” who is prepared to sacrifice everything for his vocation to God.

Fiennes, the oldest of six children, says he is not religious himself, but his novelist mother Jini was a devout Catholic at one point and the family went to mass on a Sunday.

“I remember when I was 13 saying ‘I didn’t want to go to church, I think it’s boring,’ ” he recalls with a wry grin. “My mother got very upset, but I grew up in a family that talked about God and was at ease about religious matters.”

Brand reunites director Adrian Noble and Ralph Fiennes for the first time since their work on the groundbreaking cycle of history plays, The Plantaganets, in 1988.

Fiennes has taken a break from filming to concentrate on the stage production and says returning to Stratford has been a bit like stepping through a time-warp.

“I had a memorable season when I was back here in 1988 and keep expecting to see actors I worked with then. I walk down the corridors and I remember conversations I had.

“Everything is still here - the river, the swans, the tourists. It’s like time has collapsed and I’m back.”

Adrian Noble and Ralph went to Norway to help research the production and the director graciously says it takes an actor of Ralph Fiennes’s stature to make a drama like Brand work.

“He won’t say it,” says Adrian gesturing to Ralph, “but there are not many actors who can do a play like Brand. The demands on the actor are not far off from those performing King Lear. You’ve got to have an extraordinary talent.”

Theatre-trained Fiennes has always returned to the stage in between film work and has enjoyed success with Hamlet, Ivanov and Richard II and Coriolanus.

It’s almost 10 years since he shot to fame and gained his first Oscar nomination for Schindler’s List. His portrayal of Nazi Amon Goeth took him on to the Hollywood A-list, a position cemented the following year with his sympathetic performance as Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show.

Since then he’s been the doomed lover in The English Patient and the psychotic serial killer in Red Dragon and turned to romantic comedy this year with Maid in Manhattan.

The 40-year-old says he is looking at future film scripts, but all his attention at the moment is on Brand.

His long-term partner, actress Francesca Annis, has already been to see the production at Swan Theatre in Stratford. “She gave me a few notes afterwards,” he laughs, “but I’m not revealing what she said.”

Times Teaser- Thanks Mickledore for text and image

Brand
By Benedict Nightingale

Haymarket, SW1, until Aug 30 (020-7930 8800)

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.

 

 

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