5th June 2003 - What's on Stage ReviewThanks Gigi, for this contribution:
Brand
Venue: Haymarket, Theatre Royal
Where: West End
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For the production that marks, respectively, their return to and departure from the Royal Shakespeare Company, neither Ralph Fiennes nor former artistic director Adrian Noble have taken the easy option. Henrik Ibsen's Brand is a morally rigid, often loathsome, Lutheran preacher trapped in a long and difficult play - a challenge both to act and to stage.In fact, Ibsen himself never intended Brand to be staged. Written as a "dramatic poem" in 1865, it didn't receive its premiere until 1885, when the unwieldy text required a whopping six and a half hours of performance time.
Noble's production of Michael Meyer's existing translation clocks in at just under three hours (including interval) yet still fails to excise vast tracts of sermonising, particularly in the overly long first half during which Brand, the missionary preacher, returns to the frozen Norwegian north of his unloved loner childhood to be hailed as a reluctant local leader. By comparison, the second half - when his own brand of uncompromising "all or nothing" religion takes its full, devastating toll - seems perfectly formed, a tragedy in two acts.
Fiennes' portrayal is a highly detailed one. As a friend commented to me afterwards, there's no doubt we're in the presence of great acting here. Fiennes' Brand stoops like an old man from the weight of his calling, his movements stiff and mannered as if the whole of his wiry body is one ruthlessly clenched muscle. He pinches his lips into a permanent frown and speaks with obvious effort, as if his words are chewing up the insides of his mouth before he has a chance to spit them out with distaste. It's sometimes difficult to understand how such a pitiless prig can inspire such a passionate following, but you don't want to take your eyes off him nevertheless.
For her part as his chief disciple-turned-wife Claire Price is stunning, delivering a highly emotional study in sacrifice and loss. Elsewhere, there is able support from Oliver Cotton as the conscienceless mayor, Susan Engel as Brand's unrepentantly greedy mother and Alan David as both the lax doctor and corrupt provost.
Peter McKintosh's minimalist set - framed by a semi-circular wall of grey slats that occasionally part, chasm-like - finds the company conjuring up from thin air the grim realities of their icy mountain region. It would have been interesting to see the production in Stratford's intimate Swan, where it was first staged, but you don't feel cheated having it re-set in the proscenium arch Haymarket.
Theologically dense and dramatically difficult, this Brand may not make for a comfortable evening, but by the end, the audience reaps ample benefit for its perseverance.
- Terri Paddock
Thanks Mickledore for contributing this review:
Brand - The GuardianTheatre Royal Haymarket, London
Michael Billington
Thursday June 5, 2003
"Fiennes's finest hour on stage."
How are we to take Ibsen's Brand? Is he hero or villain? Visionary prophet or fanatic fundamentalist?The greatness of Ibsen's 1865 play, fully realised in Adrian Noble's production and Ralph Fiennes's performance, is that he is both. And in that sense he is a symbol of his author's paradoxical nature.
Any bald description of Ibsen's plot tends to highlight his protagonist's monstrosity. Brand, after all, is a Lutheran pastor with a fierce hatred of compromise. He refuses the last rites to his dying mother when she fails to renounce her wealth.
Even worse, Brand sacrifices his son's life to his vocational calling. And he denies his long-suffering wife, Agnes, the right to grieve, killing her by bringing her to a state of religious exaltation.
But Ibsen is too great a dramatist to give us a portrait of a bigot. While emphasising Brand's hardness, he also brings out his courage and capacity for doubt.
The key moment is Brand, having denied his mother penance, being terrified that God will put him to further trial. And though his first instinct is to save his son, he is checked by the local doctor who cries "so merciless towards your flock, so lenient towards yourself". From then on, Brand is forced to act out his role as evangelist.
Noble's production, sparely staged, grasps the point that the play is both about the dangers of moral absolutism and the loneliness of protestant individualism: it even has something of the satire of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress in its portrait of the vacillating cowardice of figures like the local mayor and provost who become the equivalents of Mr Worldly Wiseman.
And by placing the action inside a ribbed, semi-circular frame, beautifully designed and lit by Peter McKintosh and Peter Mumford respectively, Noble forces us to focus on the play's unending series of moral choices.
This is also Ralph Fiennes's finest hour on stage. Instead of making Brand a figure of unswerving self-righteousness, his character recognises that "it is man's will that acquits or condemns him". At that moment Fiennes clenches his fist as if forcing him himself into a state of transcendence.
And Fiennes never lets us forget the cost of Brand's punitive, single mindedness: when he forbids his wife to grieve he buries himself in Bible study as if scorched to his soul. Even if you don't like Brand you at least understand him.
And Claire Price's performance as Agnes, filled with a rapt submission that is anything but supine, adds to the sense of the tragic cost of undeviating idealism. A monumental evening.
Thanks Freya for contributing this review:
Financial Times
Brand Theatre Royal, Haymarket, LondonBy ALASTAIR MACAULAY.
5 June 2003Ralph Fiennes specialises in playing title roles. He has been the English Patient, Hamlet, Ivanov, Onegin, Richard II, Coriolanus; and now he tackles Ibsen's Brand. Brand isn't one of the kings or noblemen that this actor likes to play onstage - but in his soul he is as noble as hell, devoid of all humour, and fixated on God, redemption, and as much suffering as he can cram into life. But the role is already a problem; the play's another; and then there's the separate problem of Fiennes R., with his determination to do Great Acting.
Ibsen didn't write Brandto be acted. It contains such special effects as avalanches; and it was intended to be read. When first staged during Ibsen's lifetime, 19 years after he wrote it, it lasted over six hours. Mercifully, the Royal Shakespeare Company's new staging has been cut to play at just under three hours; and Adrian Noble, directing, and Peter McKintosh, directing, have pared away all scenic effects until one great coup de theatre - largely achieved by Peter Mumford's lighting and Mic Pool's sound - for the avalanche at the end, which coincides with a final, transcendent illumination for Brand himself. The production still doesn't quite convince me that Brand is good theatre - it was a bore 12 years ago at the Aldwych - but it would seem a valiant attempt were it not for its protagonist.
Fiennes doesn't so much act the role as smear it thickly with his usual Great Acting overlay. Very slowly he half-chants the role in a vocal tone that has been specially cultivated to sound hard, bitter, miserable, and belonging to some other species than homo sapiens; he has devised various odd stances, all carefully arranged to catch the light. It's all intensely delivered, and it all projects, but every bit of it seems to have been conceived from outside.
Brand's tragic flaw - there isn't much else to him - is his ruthless will, denying compassion or weakness in himself or others. In one way or another, he sacrifices his mother, his wife, and his child. But the one thing that makes him interesting is that Ibsen from time to time shows us the chinks in his armour, the personal cost involved in his martyrlike commitment to redemption. And it's precisely this that Fiennes is unable to make believable. When he speaks of his love for his wife or child, we can't believe he means it even when he lays it on with a trowel. George Eliot wrote of people who know everything about violets except how they smell; and Fiennes is like that when it comes to human feeling. When he suffers, he still goes in for wholly artificial vocal tone, choppy phrasing, and the odd throbbing syllable.
As his wife (Agnes B.), Claire Price is often touching; her conflict of belief and unbelief counts for more than his. Still, the best performance are on the sidelines. Ian Drysdale makes a great impact as Brand's most devoted parishioner, and Susan Engel is outstanding as Brand's mother, ordered by her son to renounce all her wordly goods as she prepared for death. As she leaves the stage, she suddenly stops and asks, with expression as hauntingly melodic as it is deeply affecting: "Why was my soul made flesh if love of the flesh is death to the soul?" Nothing Fiennes says ever pierces so cleanly to the heart of Ibsen's drama. Tel 0870 901 3356
Thanks Mickledore for contributing this review:
RALPH SUFFERS FOR HIS ART, AND SO DO WE
Michael Coveney
The Daily Mail - 6.6.03Rating: One star out of five.
Something is immediately wrong about Adrian Noble's production of Ibsen's impossible play about a grim Lutheran preacher who decides that Christianity excludes human compassion.
A glance at the published play's stage directions suggests snow, wild mountain passes, steep fjords, a ruined church, rain, mist and biting winds.
A glance at the bare-boarded, cylindrical design by Peter McKintosh on the Haymarket stage suggests an inefficient sauna where the customers keep their coats on in case the heating system conks out.
Ibsen never intended his sprawling dramatic poem to be performed and there are moments in this version - quite a lot of them - when you rather wish the old boy's intentions had been fully honoured.
Brand demands all or nothing of his flock and destroys his own family by misunderstanding the nature of human sacrifice.
He ends up being persecuted by his own parishioners, stoned and vilified as he stumbles towards an Ice Church in the sky, with stigmata on his hands and a bleeding scalp where a crown of thorns might have been.
But as Ralph Fiennes suggests, even this priggish inflexibility is flawed by Brand's own admission that you cannot love everyone until you have loved one person.
The way he plays the role is so studied and self-conscious that he leaves no room for us to think he is anything but a complete fool whose loveless childhood has justified, in a warped way, his cruelty to those closest to him.
He refuses his dying mother the last sacrament because she clings to her money. He causes the death of his baby son by staying in the wintry north.
And when he compels his wife to part with every last scrap of their dead child's clothing to help out a beggar woman, he kills her by pushing her onwards to a climax of religious exultation.
Ibsen wrote the play in 1865 with the Bible as his constant reading, and you can only conclude that the result is the worst advert for religious fervour and dedication ever composed.
Adrian Noble's chilly and cheap-looking production is a commercially funded presentation with an RSC logo, a sort of scandalously branded Brand that has nothing to do with a great national company. The crowd scenes are scrawny and ludicrous and many of the supporting performances abysmal.
Even when the National failed with the play 25 years ago, they had the good grace to provide a great design of ice floes and fissured mountains and a fine new translation by a living poet, Geoffrey Hill. Michael Meyer's tired old text misses poetry by a mile. Its sad idea of a funny line is "I'll hit you with my stick".
There is nothing funny, of course, about a hero who believes that his work is the salvation of man, and you could read Fiennes's heavy-handed "objective" style of acting as his way of criticizing the role.
But this removes all tragic dimension to Brand's obsessiveness and robs the drama of its drama.
Claire Price emotes eagerly as the distraught wife and Susan Engel and Clifford Rose chip in with effective scenes as the old mother and the craven schoolmaster.
Fiennes, however, is so turned in on himself that his concentration leaves him gasping for air as he sinks beneath a ton of embarrassing verbiage and symbolism.
Thanks Mickledore for contributing:
June 05, 2003
Icy man cometh into his own
By Ian Johns
Brand
Theatre Royal, Haymarket(He gives it three stars out of five)
YOU’VE got to hand it to Ralph Fiennes. Whenever the film star returns to his stage roots he never takes the easy option of a Noël Coward crowdpleaser for his fans. Instead he gives us Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus and, most recently, Carl Jung. Now he’s playing one of Ibsen’s toughest heroes, the grimly idealistic Nordic pastor Brand, for whom the rigid principle of “all or nothing” only adds to the gloom of the mist-shrouded fiords.
Brand is so intent on bringing back his flock to the stark absolutes of the Old Testament that he even overlooks the power of divine love until it’s too late, when a voice alerts him to it just before his mountaintop death. Along the way his unswerving idealism has cost the lives of his young son and grieving wife. “God is not as hard as you,” one of his followers tells him in Michael Meyer’s vintage translation, and you believe it.
The role of Brand certainly plays to Fiennes’s strength as an actor, with the cold disdain of his features and the sardonic quality of his voice. He gives us a restless soul, capable of guarded tenderness but also the sermonising resolve of this self-made martyr.
But Fiennes revels in the part with every line, inflection and gesture finely honed, his face a riot of grimaces, curled lips and furrowed brows. He’s a virtuoso at describing the exterior results of his inner turbulence but it’s hard to be moved by him.
That’s partly due to Brand himself, a character who constantly alienates our allegiance. If Ibsen’s other major heroic figure, Peer Gynt, is a compromising opportunist, Brand is the polar opposite and it’s his rigidity that makes the play a problem. As each new situation presents itself, one knows exactly what Brand won’t do to prevent another tragedy.
For his swansong as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble adopts an appropriately austere approach, with the action played on a black marble floor with a semi-circular wooden wall behind. Sound and light are used to conjure up everything in Ibsen’s symbol-fraught epic, from an ice church to the avalanche that claims Brand’s life.
Noble ensures that Fiennes gets good support from Claire Price as his spouse and disciple, turning movingly from inspired young woman to careworn wife. It’s their brief moments of domestic tenderness, and some vignettes of parochial corruption involving Oliver Cotton’s mayor with a vulpine smile and Alan David’s hypocritical priest, that provide crumbs of welcome relief from the pervading gloom that reduces most of the grey-clad cast to hand-ringing anguish and an actorly mob mentality.
Brand is a craggy mountain of a play, lasting 6½ hours in its original version. Noble’s production comes in at just under three, but it can still feel like a long trek up the chilly north face of a play that solemnly asks whether Brand’s much-vaunted integrity is a sign of spiritual superiority or mere egotism. It’s a question worth asking, and Fiennes is the man to bring in the public to ponder it. But even if you’re simply looking for a star turn, be warned — the chill factor is immense, so wrap up warm.
Thanks to Freya for contributing:
Evening Standard
Fiennes fails to ignite Ibsen's rare firebrandNICHOLAS DE JONGH
5 June 2003THERE may have been wild hopes that Ralph Fiennes would lend sexual glamour and charisma to Henrik Ibsen's mighty poetic drama about Brand, a young Lutheran pastor with a mission to force a materialistic, immoral Norwegian parish back to God. But Fiennes limply takes the title role in Adrian Noble's old-fashioned production and plays it almost all wrong. Brand is a priest with fire, fanaticism and fury in his soul. He follows the Old Testament call of his conscience and believes compromise is the sign of moral weakness. It is Brand's tragedy - and the play's - that this pastor's idealistic, all-ornothingpersonality leads to his own death in an avalanche, as well as his wife Agnes and infant son. Brand seethes with worrying passion and energy: in Norway, he has even been played as a Hitler figure, intent upon cleansing society of its sickness.
Yet when Fiennes first strides on he seems unsuitably swathed in glum, disgruntled listlessness, without a flicker of power or sexappeal. His tone is monotonous and rather nasal; his face and lower-lip are forever caught in grimaces. He sports a well- buttonedup dark jacket and grey trousers which match his personality.
There are few traces of divine sparkiness or of the right, furious religious stuff until the closing stages when, blooded and Christ-like, Fiennes achieves a melodramatic vigour.
Otherwise, his appearance and manner disconcertingly recall Leonard Rossiter in TV's Rising Damp. Noble's production strikes strangely old-fashioned notes, his usual, adventurous drive curbed.
Brand's flock, apart from Oliver Cotton's mildly villainous mayor and Alan David doubling as a wily doctor and unctuous provost, act like extras in an opera. The play's scenic range, with journeys up mountains and down to fjords, roaring waterfalls, and the climactic avalanche, is huge.
But instead of using video or photographic projection to conjure up the Nordic landscapes, designer Peter McKintosh is allowed to play it cheap, safe and unatmospheric.
His set primarily consists of a semicircular, wood-slatted rear wall.
Only in the final moments does McKintosh spring a real change when the wall vanishes, the stage is suffused with mist and Brand realises too late that man can be saved by love rather than a cruel, implacable God.
The use of Michael Meyer's 43-yearold translation ensures Brand in performance sounds a little like a 19th century closet melodrama, penned by a minor, British romantic poet. What strongly emerges, though, is the selfdestructiveness of Brand's life-journey and the extent of his masochistic fidelity to his faith and parish. These impulses ruin him. And Fiennes does succeed in vividly conveying the pastor's stoic dourness, once his life acquires a dreamlike quality of strangeness.
Having effortlessly prized away Claire Price's touchingly vulnerable Agnes from Alistair Petrie's young homme fatale, Brand settles down to live through the dark day of his soul with flinty rigour. Agnes, the least liberated of all Ibsen wives, submits without complaint to him and fearfully witnesses him raging at his worldly mother (memorable Susan Engel), the first of his victims. This does not rank as a first-rate Ibsen production, but its rarity value is a recommendation.
Another from Freya, thanks:-)
Daily Express
BY ROBERT GORE-LANGTON
6 June 2003BRAND Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London SW1, 0870 901 3356, until August 30
RALPH FIENNES is one of the handful of British stage actors to make the current Hollywood A-List.
He can be terrific on screen (as in the recent Red Dragon) or he can be awful (as in Maid in Manhattan) but you can't accuse him of not keeping his end up in the theatre where he trained. Already this year, he has been in a cracking play about Freud. Now there's this - a symbolic masterpiece by the Norwegian genius Ibsen.
If the words "symbolic masterpiece" don't have you running for cover, you'll find much to chew on in this mighty drama about a ferocious priest, Brand (Fiennes), set in 19th-century Norway. This is a parable about an intensely religious man who will not compromise. Brand marries Agnes (the haunting Claire Price) and has a child but he's such a religious zealot - his great motto is "all or nothing" - he lets his son die of cold rather than leave his parishioners.
Weird though this deeply gloomy play is, the hair-cropped Fiennes - never off stage - rises to its mighty challenge. You can almost see the storm raging inside Brand's head as he castigates himself and his fellow sinners. The most creepy of these is the town's oily mayor, played by Oliver Cotton.
Director Adrian Noble's production, though, is let down by a drab and claustrophobic wooden walled set which lacks the visual thrill of the play's setting amid the fiords and glaciers. Still, the fatal avalanche at the end is worth the wait and there are many moments in this stormy saga of sin and retribution which chill the blood.
There's plenty of tat in the West End right now.
If you want some challenging, epic drama, Brand is the ticket.
Thanks Freya, for contributing:
Daily Telegraph
Fiennes fire lights Ibsen gloom First Night.By Charles Spencer.
Brand
THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKETI HAVE said some cruel things about Adrian Noble since he said he was quitting as artistic director of the RSC just when the company was spiralling into self-inflicted crisis, but this is no time to carp.
His swansong production of Ibsen's Brand is a glorious occasion: daring, deeply felt, powerfully affecting and blessed with a truly tremendous performance from Ralph Fiennes in the title role that those who see it will never forget. It is a mark of the RSC's troubles that the show has had to be entirely backed by commercial producers, but even here there is cause for hope.
At a time when most West End impresarios and theatre owners are playing desperately safe and offering any old tat as long as there is a star name or two to put bums on seats, this is a return to 24-carat quality in London's commercial theatre. I pray that the courage of these plucky entrepreneurs is duly rewarded, for they are taking a huge risk.
Even by the grim standards of Ibsen, this is an exceptionally daunting drama. Written in 1865, it was the work that finally established his reputation. But it is a piece that makes exceptionally heavy demands on its audience. Ibsen never expected it to be staged, seeing it more as a dramatic poem than a conventional play, and his portrait of a driven Lutheran priest who sacrifices everything in his pursuit of a harsh God is unrelenting in its anguish.
You do not think things can get much worse when Brand refuses his mother the final sacrament because she has not fully repented her sins. But this is as nothing to the man of God. He allows his beloved son to die rather than move from his cold and dismal parsonage, then insists that his wife should surrender her dead infant's clothes which he describes as her idols. The unbearable pain kills her, too.
Ibsen always insisted that Brand could just as well have been a sculptor, an artist, a politician or a scientist - anyone, in fact, who is obsessed by his own vision and pursues it to the bitter end. But for once I think Ibsen was wrong. What makes this play remarkable even among his powerful work is its thrilling account of embattled religious faith and its passionate attempt to understand the relationship between God and man.
It is as close as the theatre has come to matching the raw spiritual intensity of Gerard Manley Hopkins's dark sonnets - and every bit as moving.
Noble stages the production on an almost bare stage, making no pictorial attempt to suggest the mountains and fjords and the impoverished village where the action is set. What brings the show alive is the power and simplicity of his direction and the passion and commitment of the acting.
Fiennes has never been better than he is here: wired, blazing-eyed and exuding a self-lacerating intensity that persuades you that this apparently cruel and perhaps even deranged man is truly worth caring about. Just when the character is becoming unbearable, Fiennes reveals sudden glimpses of vulnerability and dreadful hurt that cut at the heart like a knife.
Claire Price is superb too, as his loyal and loving wife, providing this harsh play with moments of beautiful, heart-catching tenderness.
There is strong support from Oliver Cotton as a splendidly corrupt mayor and Alan David, doubling brilliantly as a kind doctor and a worldly cleric.
In the final act, Ibsen's merciless masterpiece becomes positively transcendent and Noble captures its visionary quality with the simplest of resources and a stunning climactic coup de theatre.
For all its Nordic gloom, this is a night of theatre that sets the imagination ablaze.
Freya contributor:
The Independent
Fiennes brings force and grace to Ibsen's harsh, tormented heroBy Rhoda Koenig
05 June 2003Casting an actor of such extreme gorgeousness as Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Brand somewhat undermines the plausibility and point of Ibsen's tormented hero.
Gorgeous men - as Fiennes is, despite a prison haircut and a hunter's crouch - do not generally renounce the world to wander it, preaching the word. Nor does the beautiful Agnes's desertion of her fiancé for Brand seem like a triumph for his faith. Fiennes hardly has to risk his life, as Brand does, for female devotion - he could just recite the telephone directory.
This casting, however, makes Brand's harsh asceticism not only bearable but compelling. Not that Fiennes ever uses his voice seductively, or plays the romantic hero. Lines that could be ringing declarations are spoken quietly, as if Brand wishes to convince himself; on the two occasions he delivers a fatal "no," we hear, instead of firmness, submission and regret.
Brand, whose parents never loved him - when his mother speaks, caressingly, of "my treasure, my child of pain," she is talking about her money - has rationalised their coldness into a belief that love must be deserved. This wreaks a terrible vengeance on the mother, whom he denounces and spurns, but Brand is the one who suffers most, sacrificing his child, his wife, and finally himself to the idea that "the victory of victories is to lose everything".
Adrian Noble has trimmed Michael Meyer's eloquent translation, but Brand still takes nearly three hours. They fly.
Unnervingly for those in the stalls, actors stalk down the aisles and through the side doors. Alan David, the only actor with a Norwegian accent - a good one - is excellent as the doctor, one of Ibsen's well-meaning busybodies who leave corpses in their wake.
The female parts, though, are weak. As Agnes, Claire Price is embarrassingly below the level of Fiennes, her demonstrations of innocence and anguish too twitchy and calculated.
Laura Rees as Gerd, the mad mountain girl with the mystic connection to Brand - her father was a rejected suitor of Brand's mother - is too slender and pretty for the role, her voice too shallow and genteel. Her costume - artfully distressed layers rather than authentic-looking rags - strikes a false note, as do the clothes of all the mountain villagers, whose garments seem to have been cut from the same few bolts of slate-coloured cloth.
The stark set is dull - a wall of vertical grey slats that curves in a semicircle. The celestial voice at the end sounds about as impressive as that of the Wizard of Oz.
Yet none of this matters next to the mountain that is this great play and the intelligence of its lead actor. There are many times when Ibsen's statements of human error and longing strike hard enough to make us gasp, and Fiennes never fails to send them winging to us with force and grace. Through the stale, perfumed air of the West End, Brand blows like a frigid, bracing wind.
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