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A review by batbones
Brand by Henrik Ibsen
5.0
This play by Ibsen is relatively old, yes, but in this day where one is used to creature comforts (not just Eliot's 'evening[s] with the photograph album', but microwaves and air-conditioned buses and Amazon next-day delivery) and decentred humanist concerns dominate the cultural dialogue, it is astounding that Hill's adaptation/version of it, his careful poetry, can make spiritual dilemma and the bewildering paradoxes of Christian salvation, the survival of faith in the midst of death, speak again with such immediate force. Brand is dark, cold and bleak (even without the weather), where the words 'sacrifice' and 'surrender' retain their original meaning and terrible demand.
The titular character seeks the saved through a New Testament system with Abrahamic fervour, one of the crucial ironies (or is it necessities?) of the play. What he knows, seeks and finds is justice, but even the passion for martyrdom, Ibsen (or is it Hill?) suggests becomes its own form of pride. The reader is made to feel the pressures of keeping an absolute law when people change, the world itself changes, when those you love may die. The most moving of scenes involve him being torn between two commitments - whether they are his love for Agnes his wife and family, his service to God and devotion to his stiff-necked and mercurial congregation, material/personal concerns versus spiritual servitude/duty. That he is a family man humanises the fire-and-brimstone in him, if only dramatically sharpening that contrast and thus making his dilemmas more terrible. (He seems to have forgotten 1 Timothy 5:8, that those who fail to provide first for their family is worse than an infidel. Anyhow.) Sacrifice, giving up, finds its value only with attendant, overwhelming pain; always the dynamic of 'despite that, I choose to ___.' When Agnes gives up the baby clothes of her dead son, her sole memento of him, to clothe the baby of a woman stranger, it takes so much out of her that she describes herself in a poignant line as a corpse dragged along the road of life by her husband, an echo of the body of her 'little son' she knows is buried just outside the house. There is so much tension in the smallest act in this play, even in the closing of the window to block out the world. Brand's God says 'Give me now' (and that it is 'give' and not 'I take from you' is crucial), but how much does he have left to give?
The titular character seeks the saved through a New Testament system with Abrahamic fervour, one of the crucial ironies (or is it necessities?) of the play. What he knows, seeks and finds is justice, but even the passion for martyrdom, Ibsen (or is it Hill?) suggests becomes its own form of pride. The reader is made to feel the pressures of keeping an absolute law when people change, the world itself changes, when those you love may die. The most moving of scenes involve him being torn between two commitments - whether they are his love for Agnes his wife and family, his service to God and devotion to his stiff-necked and mercurial congregation, material/personal concerns versus spiritual servitude/duty. That he is a family man humanises the fire-and-brimstone in him, if only dramatically sharpening that contrast and thus making his dilemmas more terrible. (He seems to have forgotten 1 Timothy 5:8, that those who fail to provide first for their family is worse than an infidel. Anyhow.) Sacrifice, giving up, finds its value only with attendant, overwhelming pain; always the dynamic of 'despite that, I choose to ___.' When Agnes gives up the baby clothes of her dead son, her sole memento of him, to clothe the baby of a woman stranger, it takes so much out of her that she describes herself in a poignant line as a corpse dragged along the road of life by her husband, an echo of the body of her 'little son' she knows is buried just outside the house. There is so much tension in the smallest act in this play, even in the closing of the window to block out the world. Brand's God says 'Give me now' (and that it is 'give' and not 'I take from you' is crucial), but how much does he have left to give?