YMMV / Brand

• Anvilicious: With a character like Brand, there is no way around this one. He, and as a consequence Ibsen himself, dropped his anvils so hard they still echo across space and time, and makes this play somewhat hard to swallow.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: This play is, quite obviously, interpreted to death many times.
• Fridge Brilliance: Brand in the fifth act, having a soliloquy on the subject of pollution, among other things. He goes in detail on the "black British coal dust" embracing the country. And some hundred-odd years later, the problems of acid rain came to Norway as a dire consequence of British coal burning.
  Direr visions, worse foreboding,
  Glare upon me through the gloom !
  Britain s smoke-cloud sinks corroding
  On the land in noisome fume ;
  Smirches all its tender bloom,
  All its gracious verdure dashes,
  Sweeping low with breath of bane,
  Stealing sunlight from the plain,
  Showering down like rain of ashes
  On the city of God s doom.
  • The entire soliloquy is a brilliant example of Nightmare Fuel.
• Fridge Logic / Harsher in Hindsight: Brand`s hampering on the "will of man", and the Heroic Willpower may come out as an example of Values Dissonance after World War II. Especially when considering the infamous Riefenstahl movie Triumph of the Will almost using Brand`s Catchphrase as a title. In more recent times, the crowd bellowing With Us or Against Us may fall under the same cathegory, because American president George W. Bush used the same phrase when he began The War on Terror. Not that Ibsen himself could possibly have known about this.
• Tear Jerker: The entire fourth act qualifies, on behalf of Agnes and her agonizing loss.
• The Woobie: Einar, poor guy. He ends up losing his fiance to a childhood friend, and then in order, his talent, his health, and his passion for life. He returns as a Broken Bird.
  • Agnes, of course, especially come the fourth act.
  • Arguably Brand himself, although more of a Jerkass Woobie.