In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Theatre Journal 56.1 (2004) 104-105


[Access article in PDF]
Brand. By Henrik Ibsen. Translated by Michael Meyer. The Royal Shakespeare Company, Haymarket Theatre, London. 19 July 2003.


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Claire Price and Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen's Brand.

Henrik Ibsen's Brand, the willfully self-absorbed Christian visionary and self-appointed Lutheran enforcer, has a good deal to say to a modern audience. Ibsen's youthful playwas a shrewd choice for a new production by the Royal Shakespeare Company. At a time when world political leaders are willing to engage in idealistic regime changes with apparent indifference to their consequences, Ibsen's anti-Faust—a man who pursues a painfully limited vision and destroys people around him—now seems like a highly relevant figure. Casting Ralph Fiennes as Brand was remarkably apt, as the role taps directly into the actor's considerable strengths. As impressive as he is on-screen, Fiennes has often seemed too restrained or sullen on the stage. But as the smart, self-deluding minister, Fiennes makes austerity and an appalling indifference to the feelings of others seem like legitimate choices.

The minister masks his deep introversion and spiritual coldness as an unbending form of Christian idealism ("Unless you give all, you give nothing," he likes to tell everyone—as if there were no other choices), and he arrogantly values his own moral rectitude as he denies the simplest human pleasures to everyone around him. Fiennes lacks only the sly, self-mocking wit that Ian McKellen used to great advantage as Dr. Stockmann in the National Theatre's 1998 production of An Enemy of the People—but then, wit and self-awareness are hardly the most obvious features of Pastor Brand.

Despite his repellent coldness, Fiennes's Brand is still startlingly charismatic, when, for example, he interrupts the playful flirtation between Agnes and Ejnar, or when he manages to persuade the villagers to reject the opulent new church that he has just built for them with the money from his mother's [End Page 104] estate. Late in the play, when the disillusioned villagers who have followed Brand up into the Norwegian mountains are preparing to stone him, one of them characterizes him as "[a] bad son, a bad father, a bad husband. Where could you find a worse Christian?" Fiennes appears moments later as a bruised and bleeding Christ-like figure, with a halo of blood on his forehead; yet Brand is willing to face the terrors of the ice and precipices as resolutely as he had at the beginning of the play. Fiennes's Brand goes to his death amid an effective stage avalanche, with as little self-knowledge as the most willful of Greek tragic heroes.

In an arguably even more difficult role than Brand, Claire Price, as Brand's long-suffering wife Agnes, was remarkably sympathetic. If Brand is the anti-Peer Gynt, Agnes is the anti-Nora, as she loyally accepts a continuously diminishing set of expectations about life. She submits to Brand's refusal to leave their icy mountain home, even at the cost of their little son's death. In the potentially sentimental scene, in which she endures Brand's lunatic refusal to allow her to enjoy the first Christmas after the son's death, Price's Agnes submits painfully to Brand's demand that she give away all of the son's baby clothing to a gypsy mother. Her reward for filling the stage with Christmas lights is Brand's ice-cold dismissal: "Stay with your idols." In this production, it is clear that it is Brand's heartlessness—as much as the Norwegian winters—that will send her to an early death. Touchingly, his wife's submission to patriarchal authority persists beyond the grave. When Agnes returns, as the mysterious figure from heaven, to urge Brand to accept some earthly comforts, she speaks for the audience as much as for God in her despairing farewell: "Die! The world has no use for you."

As Brand's mother, Sue Engel made the most of her single scene. Her powerful determination and materialism greatly helped...

pdf

Share