Strip Peer of his faults, and his representative stature would contract.Perhaps Norwegians' ability to take into their daily lives the creations of their significant artists connects with the fact that when, on 7 June 1905, their country won its final independence from Sweden, their three artistic titans - one per art - were all living: Ibsen, Grieg, Munch (though Ibsen was incapacitated by stroke). Peer boasts, tells preposterous tall stories, abducts a bride, deserts his sweetheart and wanders the world over, wasting time and energy. Barnum (called after the circus) is a maverick individual, small in stature, a drunk, a failure as both husband and writer. Anyway, is he really the half-brother of the title, or does that honour go to his mother's even more wayward older son, Fred the boxer? Yet the name for the library extension meets with general approval, and one thinks of what Norway has done with Peer Gynt. It's somehow fitting I learn this here at the Ibsen Centre, because such too has been the fate of many Ibsen characters. "We tend to speak of them - Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler and others - as if they were real Norwegians," says the novelist Merete Morken Andersen.
"Just mention their names, and everybody knows at once the situations they were in, and how they dealt with them." The central character of the phenomenally successful The Half-Brother is hardly an obvious role-model for patrons of a cultural institution. "Everyone was very pleased with the decision." So already the title and hero of Lars Saabye Christensen's best-selling novel of 2001 are common currency. The new extension to Oslo's National Library has just been named: "It's Halvbroren (The Half-Brother)," I'm informed. However, Nicholas Gleaves' and Siobhan Finneran's grieving Peter and Alice are both poignantly subdued and fiercely angry A rewarding transfer from Manchester's Royal Exchange KBTo 23 August 020 7452 3000. Flat-toned, nervous adolescent talk is also captured deftly, with Sarah (excellent Carla Henry) hovering between polite smiles and completely out-of-order questions about Peter's marriage.Most refreshingly, none of this leads where you expect.
Instead of an incestuous tangle, this play quietly turns into a tragedy about the loss of a child and the emotional devastation of that.Sarah Frankcom's staging needs slight tweaking and Stephens introduces one naff, poetry-reciting character. Yet what's absorbing is the gentle comedy and the menace in this portrait of three generations - including David Hargreaves as a kindly grandfather with a hidden cruel streak. His dad, Peter, is mellow while his mum, Alice, admits she feels uneasy. Meanwhile, Alex's kid-brother, Christopher (Steven Webb) - who can be a nutter - becomes smitten with Sarah and she starts flirting with Peter.Some might regard this as soapy. Overhead looms a pale moon and down below a teenager, Alex (Thomas Morrison), is bringing his girlfriend, Sarah, to stay at his parents' house for the first time.
