Plain Talk
The plays of Ibsen, like those of Chekhov, are part of the English repertoire; as early as 1889 Ibsen's Ghosts was staged in London. Currently two Ibsen plays are on show there: The Master Builder at the Albery Theatre; and Brand at the Theatre Royal in the Haymarket. When Bernard Shaw coined the term Ibsenism he couldn't have foreseen that Ibsen's popularity would extent into the second millennium.
During my long stay in London and on subsequent, frequent visits, I remember attending several of Ibsen's plays. Peggy Ashcroft as Hedda Gabler, Claire Bloom in The Doll's House and The Wild Duck are among the memories I still cherish. My last Ibsen, attended quite recently, was John Gabriel Borkman at the National Theatre.
Ibsen's plays reflect a rejection of the mores and traditions of Norwegian life in the 1880s; Ibsen was so unhappy with his country he left altogether in 1864, living abroad for 27 years. He went first to Rome, moved to Dresden and Munich, then back again to Rome; he seemed to be running away from the moral sloppiness and hypocrisy that he mocks in his writing. He was also avoiding Norway's then conservative theatrical tradition.
Adrian Noble, the director of Brand, describes his contribution in terms of lighting "a creative bonfire that was to transform late 19th- century intellectual and artistic life forever," the torch Ibsen used being that very play. The fourth Ibsen work to be directed by Noble, it will establish his reputation as an Ibsen expert -- a position to contend with.
I must admit that I scarcely know Brand, despite my interest in Ibsen. Conceived in 1885 as a narrative poem, it was soon rewritten as a verse drama. Here, as elsewhere in his plays, Ibsen moves from an expressly moral and social mode to one that is psychological and visionary, switching from the purely dramatic to a symbolic problematic. In the process he proved sensational; people are said to have filed out of the theatre following the premiere of A Doll's House, their faces showing palpable discomfort.
Surveying Ibsen's corpus, one cannot fail to see that his protagonists are predominantly women, with men invariably assuming a secondary role. The plays are age-conscious too. Brand is a young man who grows old in the course of the play, while in The Master Builder a 60-year-old man and a 20-year-old girl construct an erotic sand castle and willfully destroy themselves in the process. When he wrote the latter play Ibsen, already old, was attached to two young women who occupied such a significant part of his household life they made his wife jealous. They made their mark on Hedda Gabler too. Ibsen is known to have referred to one of them, a German girl aged 18, as "my May sun in a September life".
I have yet to see the work of Adrian Noble, but the way he describes preparing for his production of Brand makes it sound impressive indeed. For one thing, his choice of Ralph Fiennes in the main role is ideal. He also took Fiennes to Norway, to work on the play in its original context. Noble describes their trip as a kind of odyssey. They had four or five days of travelling and working on the text. They saw a lot of art, they contemplated the landscape, they crossed fjords. They went on steamers through the mountains and walked through villages and towns, woods and forests.
"It was an extraordinary feeling," Noble writes. "We had a sense of real connection with the text, because Brand is a play in which the landscape fulfills a vital function. The mountains and the very thin strip of land upon which people live, and the deep fjords. Those are physical locations of the drama. But," Noble adds, "they are also... the iconography of the play."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 26 June - 2 July 2003 (Issue No. 644)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/644/cu3.htm