<<<Previous Page

Thanks Mickledore for contributing the following reviews:

The Sunday Times

June 08, 2003

Power without glory

In Adrian Noble’s hands, Ibsen’s Brand has become a gripping study of a self-deluded leader says John Peter

The first thing you notice about Ralph Fiennes is his eerie calm. Ibsen’s Brand (Haymarket) is, among other things, about fanaticism, and we think of fanatics as driven, highly strung, always on the edge of an explosion. But Fiennes knows, I think, that the quiet fanatic is as dangerous as, if not more than, the volatile kind, and he gives Brand, at least at first, an air of quiet confidence. His wiry body, bent very slightly forward, speaks of a determination untroubled by doubt, but it also suggests the carrying of a great burden. I fight and struggle, it says, but not for myself. Follow me, do as I say, I am one who knows. I will sacrifice myself if need be, to bring you to your God. Brand, a Lutheran pastor, is almost saying that he is, like Jesus, the way, the truth and the life. If this play is a tragedy, it is partly a tragedy of blasphemy.

Brand was not written to be performed, and the miraculous thing about Adrian Noble’s production is that he brings out the drama of the play without pretending that it is conventionally theatrical. Peter McKintosh’s tall wooden cyclorama, with a few basic props and with mists whirling behind it, turns the stage into a battleground of the spirit. Sometimes the centre opens to admit characters who have the primitive vigour and resonance of medieval religious plays. The mayor (Oliver Cotton), Brand’s mother (Susan Engel), the provost (Alan David), all represent types of humanity more than real people, and it is the actors’ skill and intelligence, treading the tightrope between allegory and life, that makes them human. Brand, calm but passionate, urges them relentlessly toward salvation.

Like all true tragic heroes, Brand understands things only gradually, and Fiennes maps his progress like a master. This is a haunting, rocklike performance, but Fiennes has grasped the central point about Brand, which is that he is like a rock that cracks because of its own unyielding hardness and rigidity.

Brand is a priest, but one who behaves like a combination of a miracle worker, a military leader and a saviour. He comes barging into people’s lives, like Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, to cure their sickness by the ruthless application of truths, and regardless, or unaware, of any collateral damage. It is no good telling him, as the mayor does, that he’s interested only in the salvation of Man, not of men: Brand cannot see any difference between the general and the particular. Like all fanatics, he is a totalitarian: there is only one way, my way, because my way is His way.

Brand’s religion is driven by will, not love. His God only takes, never gives. Brand really, genuinely, wants to lead people to him; but you begin to suspect that, for him, one of God’s functions is to justify the ways of Brand to man. “Where’s God,” he demands, “humane towards Christ?” The point here is not only that Brand is getting, morally, above his station, but also that he is in a deep theo-logical muddle. He does not seem to understand Christ’s divinity, his oneness with God the Father or his willingness to compromise. Christ, you could say, brought compromise into Judaism. What are his miracles (all right, I’ll show you that I’m divine), or his forgiveness of sinners, but acts of healing and constructive moral compromise? Christ is the great absentee character in this play; and Brand’s tragedy is that he has made himself into a spokesman of a God he has created for himself.

One of Fiennes’s and Noble’s great achievements is that they do not make Brand either ridiculous or repulsive. Goodness knows, his terrible moral pedantry exposes him to both, and there are just one or two moments in the second half when his unyielding bigotry makes you feel unsure whether to laugh or to cry. But then, being a modern person, you realise that the grotesque is an aspect of the totalitarian, the hardline fundamentalist: his demented insistence on which books to read, which music to like or the way to cut your hair.

One of the great and terrible moments in the play is when Brand’s wife, Agnes, is made to give away her dead child’s clothes, even his christening robes, to a needy, angry Gypsy woman. Agnes is one of the most difficult roles in all Ibsen, and Claire Price brings out both her sensual womanliness and the inner fervour, the sense of deep spiritual kinship she herself barely understands, that drives her to Brand. Price’s Agnes glows with the strong, warm, reasoning humanity Brand so badly needs. This is a serious, beautiful performance, full of love and pain and deep emotional intelligence, and it marks Price out as one of the finest talents of her generation.

All true tragedies end in a sense of recognition. Brand, too, realises that he is lost. Like all defeated totalitarians, he feels betrayed by the people he had led; but then he has also to take on board the futility of his whole moral enterprise. Why should people have followed him? Where exactly had he been leading them? What fight? What victory? The shrill military language of totalitarians is a hollow and dangerous metaphor. Part of Brand’s tragedy is that he finally understands this.

God, he is told, is the God of love, not the God of tyrannical intolerance. The play is a great, dour, wise parable. Brand the man is the late-Romantic artist who sacrifices his humanity to his work; the moral elitist who despises his flock; and the self- deluded leader who uses the wrong map to lead his people. Brand the play is both a monumentally old-fashioned parable and a thrillingly modern one, and to have brought it to the West End is a huge achievement.

The Observer

Susannah Clapp
Sunday June 8, 2003

Ralph Fiennes is uptight in early Ibsen

For once, the West End, usually sclerotic with pap, looks more adventurous, though not exactly more fun, than the South Bank. You have to be bold to stage Brand. Ibsen's play - written in 1865, more than a decade before The Doll's House and 20 years earlier than Hedda Gabler - was never intended to be acted. It's a poem. It contains a child of nature who comes on babbling about trolls. And its protagonist is a figure of adamantine resolution, far removed from the Third Way or the New Age: Brand founds his faith as a priest, and his personality, on lack of compro mise - he demands from his flock and his family total renunciation, not only of worldly goods but of tender feelings. It's a perilous play, sometimes absurd and sometimes repellent. And yet, grandly sculpted, carved with unforgettable chiaroscuro images - lowering mountains, candlelight, gathering darkness, a cathedral of snow - it has magnificence as well as intensity. It is completely itself. Adrian Noble's production - his swansong for the RSC - is alive with this sense.

Peter McKintosh's beautiful abstract design is lofty, unyielding. High timber boards shift through a chic Scandinavian palette under Peter Mumford's lighting - changing from slate to watery greens and ice blues; a tall black fissure opens like a fjord. In a marvellous final coup, when an avalanche sweeps down and engulfs Brand's fixed conviction, the whole hard set disappears into a cloud of white mist. Norwegian wood dissolves along with Norwegian will.

The first performance of Brand lasted for six and a half hours: women unlaced their corsets in order to last it out. No need for that here: Noble's production is brisk but not hurried. Claire Price as the high-minded but (this is Ibsen after all) outrageously submissive wife, is shining and tremulous: a bleak domestic exchange in which she and her husband catch the fear in each other's eyes is the best in the production. Susan Engel, in the smaller but crucial part of Brand's mother, dispenses a chill with her habitual grace.

As Brand, Ralph Fiennes is saturnine and taut. Cramped with misery, he forcefully suggests a character propelled by disgust at everyone else's fudging. He moves warily; he shoots suspicious looks; he seems to despise the words that fall with reluctant slowness and staccato emphases from his mouth, as if unable to bear looking at anyone else on the stage; he directs his speeches to an empyrean realm over the heads of the audience. At his most driven, he gets a Richard III lope. It's a detailed, intelligent interpretation. But it's too careful, too rational, too contained for this craggy play. What he doesn't show is someone impelled by an idealism that might justify his sacrifices, if only to himself. Brand should burn.


Here's the one from the Sunday Express:

Mark Shenton

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.

Thanks Freya for contributing:
June 8, 2003

This is the Mail on Sunday review, by Georgina Brown.

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.

Thanks Mickledore:
Independent ..Sunday

Anyone for a religious nutter? Thought not …

Kate Bassett – The Independent on Sunday – 8.6.03

Brand has landed with an almighty thud in the Haymarket. This rarely-staged play by Ibsen – welding ethics with theological didacticism – can be heavy going. In the title role, Ralph Fiennes does precious little to lighten the burden, playing Mr Intense quite remorselessly. This is particularly disappointing after his fine-tuned, subtly wry portrayal of Jung in The Talking Cure at the NT.

Directed by Adrian Noble for the RSC, Brand is at least topical: the doomed here is a destructive religious extremist. Fiennes’s character is a haggard Christian preacher who upbraids his lax contemporaries and sets about converting his fjord-side town to his creed.

Becoming a cult leader, he burns with zeal that is, in fact, as cold as the icy peaks above the settlement. The most faithful disciple he recruits is Claire Price’s wide-eyed Agnes who apparently “sees the light” when rebuked for dancing with her sweetheart. She chooses an intolerably steep and narrow road to heaven, marrying Brand who then compels her to brush aside the death of their baby and become the martyr with him. Any signs of spiritual weakness are anathema to him. His philosophy – repeatedly expounded – is “all or nothing”.

It would be harsh to suggest this production has nothing going for it. Ibsen fans may enjoy comparing this play with Peer Gynt – Brand refuses to visit his unrepentant mother’s deathbed – or A Doll’s House – Agnes leaves her husband only by giving up the ghost. Brand is also strikingly akin to Camus’ Caligula who preaches (as a nihilist) that only the uncompromising have integrity. Implicitly, Ibsen suggests a psychological explanation as well – that Brand’s fierce God is the product of his loveless childhood and consequently unbalanced mind.

Mercifully, Ibsen provides some comic relief. Oliver Cotton, as the Town Mayor, is a blackly funny, outrageously amoral old devil. And Michael Meyer’s electrifying, lyrical translation deserves an award. The cast are generally revved up, and Peter McKintosh’s design is beautifully simple with its towering wall of wooden planks.

However, directorial howlers include a climactic voice from heaven – referring Brand to the God of Love over a Tannoy system more suited to platform alterations at Clapham Junction – and Preacher Fiennes’s habit of lecturing the audience like a sinful congregation. His tender moments are rushed and his down-turned mouth is a regrettable affectation – making him look like a giant rat who’s swallowed a sourpuss. And his forte, I’m afraid, is not physical theatre: his mimed stomp through snowdrifts is embarrassingly unconvincing and his stupendously hammy limp makes you want to curl up and die before he does.

<<<Previous Page | Back to Top | Ralph Fiennes Interactive Fan Site | Fiennes Forum