YOU’VE got to hand it to Ralph Fiennes. Whenever the film star returns to his stage roots he never takes the easy option of a Noël Coward crowdpleaser for his fans. Instead he gives us Hamlet, Richard II, Coriolanus and, most recently, Carl Jung. Now he’s playing one of Ibsen’s toughest heroes, the grimly idealistic Nordic pastor Brand, for whom the rigid principle of “all or nothing” only adds to the gloom of the mist-shrouded fiords.

Brand is so intent on bringing back his flock to the stark absolutes of the Old Testament that he even overlooks the power of divine love until it’s too late, when a voice alerts him to it just before his mountaintop death. Along the way his unswerving idealism has cost the lives of his young son and grieving wife. “God is not as hard as you,” one of his followers tells him in Michael Meyer’s vintage translation, and you believe it.

The role of Brand certainly plays to Fiennes’s strength as an actor, with the cold disdain of his features and the sardonic quality of his voice. He gives us a restless soul, capable of guarded tenderness but also the sermonising resolve of this self-made martyr.

But Fiennes revels in the part with every line, inflection and gesture finely honed, his face a riot of grimaces, curled lips and furrowed brows. He’s a virtuoso at describing the exterior results of his inner turbulence but it’s hard to be moved by him.

That’s partly due to Brand himself, a character who constantly alienates our allegiance. If Ibsen’s other major heroic figure, Peer Gynt, is a compromising opportunist, Brand is the polar opposite and it’s his rigidity that makes the play a problem. As each new situation presents itself, one knows exactly what Brand won’t do to prevent another tragedy.

For his swansong as artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Adrian Noble adopts an appropriately austere approach, with the action played on a black marble floor with a semi-circular wooden wall behind. Sound and light are used to conjure up everything in Ibsen’s symbol-fraught epic, from an ice church to the avalanche that claims Brand’s life.

Noble ensures that Fiennes gets good support from Claire Price as his spouse and disciple, turning movingly from inspired young woman to careworn wife. It’s their brief moments of domestic tenderness, and some vignettes of parochial corruption involving Oliver Cotton’s mayor with a vulpine smile and Alan David’s hypocritical priest, that provide crumbs of welcome relief from the pervading gloom that reduces most of the grey-clad cast to hand-ringing anguish and an actorly mob mentality.

Brand is a craggy mountain of a play, lasting 6½ hours in its original version. Noble’s production comes in at just under three, but it can still feel like a long trek up the chilly north face of a play that solemnly asks whether Brand’s much-vaunted integrity is a sign of spiritual superiority or mere egotism. It’s a question worth asking, and Fiennes is the man to bring in the public to ponder it. But even if you’re simply looking for a star turn, be warned — the chill factor is immense, so wrap up warm.

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