Branded wrongly

There 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.