Productions - Brand - Centre for Asian Theatre




	Henrik Ibsen’s 'Brand'

	Bangla version: Munzur-i-Mowla Direction: Kamaluddin Nilu Production: Centre for Asian Theatre Support: Royal Norwegian Embassy, Dhaka

	Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is a work that has invited terms of discontinuity. Brand became, and has remained, the most powerful drama of ideas in the whole of Scandinavian literature. The play has been taken to be a theological debate between Old and New Testament concepts of divinity; the story of an individual fighting an existential battle to define his own religious identity; a celebration and an expose of idealism, secular or religious. It has been derived, for approval or blame from different philosophical systems — Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche — and related to mythical patterns of universal extent.



	The protagonist of the play Brand has been seen as both a vindication of Romanticism and its indictment; or, more recently, as the victim of psychological or socio-psychological conditioning.



	Brand is priest. As the play opens he is passing close to his childhood home on a pilgrimage in search of a higher connecting of himself with God. He becomes involved in an incident in which he shows great bravery by crossing stormy waters to hear the last confession of a dying sinner, a man who has in anger murdered his own child. No one else dare make the crossing, and Brand’s courage, built on his faith in God, wins him the admiring love of a young woman, Agnes. She deserts her boyfriend Einer, an artist, and marries Brand. They have a child. Brand abandons his personal mission to remain as pastor to the local community.



	The poor people of the village by the sea under the towering mountains follow Brand, the priest, up towards the snow and ice to reach a new age, a new world with no compromise or falsehood. A purified, a more just society for the faithful is what they envisage. Such is the strength of Brand’s rhetoric, his charismatic stature that the people are willing to follow him. His main dogma is that if only one has the will, nothing is impossible. But one has to give up everything. All or nothing is his demand. When the people realize the real cost of living up to Brand’s vision, of a new spiritual humanity, they turn violently against him and leave him battered and alone on the mountain by the Ice-church. True to his own demands he has lived by them no matter what the consequences to himself and his family. But in his vision of God, there was no room for love and mercy. Brand’s extreme idealism is alien to the world. In the end lie is buried in an avalanche. The cold, white snow and ice becomes a. powerful symbol of Brand’s own devastating puritanical views, his titanic force and will to change the minds of the people and the ways of the world. It all ends with the enigmatic words pronounced by a voice form above. He is God the merciful! Ironically it mirrors the last words of Brand’s mother: ‘God’s not hardhearted like my son.’



	Brand braves on looking beyond the salvation of the one individual. He declares that his true mission is to destroy the old image of God as a severe but kind, thin-haired, grand dad in his seventies, and to replace him with a mighty storm, an inflexible but all-loving young Hercu1es. His God is powerful as a thunderbolt striking, all-consuming as a thorn-bush burning. He is like a voice from the highs of heaven spreading terror on earth. There is no surprise that with his use of images from the Old Testament, Brand sees himself as a new Moses destined to change man’s understanding of God.



	Brand is in every respect a work of art and nothing but Brand looses everything. His idealism is too extreme, and he is absolutely inhumane in his will to drive his vision through. As he demands the impossible, he is left by all, and even by God. Isn’t it so?