For his final production as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble courageously chose Ibsen's Brand, a work rarely mounted. Ibsen wrote this huge verse drama in 1865 to be read rather than staged, and it caused an immediate sensation. Its first production did not take place for two decades, when it ran six and a half hours. Noble has used the admirable 1959 translation by Michael Meyer, Ibsen's foremost biographer, who cut the work down to manageable size by eliminating several large, extraneous digressions unrelated to the main plot.
The title role, one of the most titanic in all drama, is here portrayed by Ralph Fiennes with only moderate effectiveness. Brand is a young Lutheran priest who thinks religion has lost its proper austerity. As he states several times, one must avoid compromise: "All or Nothing" is his motto. He refuses to see his dying mother because he deems her too materialistic. He entices Agnes away from her fun-loving intended, Ejnar, and they marry. As a result of his stubbornness, both Agnes and their little son die, and Brand even insists that all keepsakes be given away to a gypsy. Eventually the villagers, who have followed his lead in erecting a new church, turn against him, and a wild girl high in the mountains is the only person with him when an avalanche engulfs both of them.
While one may admire Brand's courage and pity his fate, one cannot really like him. Fiennes has moments, but indulges in too much mannered acting; and he needs more of the Pied Piper's charisma to attract a large following. He is not helped by designer Peter McKintosh's semicircle of vertical slats, which ascends at the very end to reveal a white cyclorama. Scenes that should be outdoors find Fiennes just walking around in circles. Modern technology can do much better than this. The supporting cast is generally good, and Claire Price is highly moving as the put-upon Agnes.
