The key scene opened with Ibsen — in Rome on business — sitting disconsolately outside an osteria in the magnificent Piazza Navona, drinking wine. He was turning over several projects in his mind, but it was the text of Brand which was giving him the most trouble. He was getting nowhere. Like Duke Skule in The Pretenders he was beginning to have doubts about himself, about his calling. He was afraid that the disparity between the absolute demands and the realities of the situation, between his aims and his abilities, was too great. He sipped his white wine, gazing at the fountain in the centre of the square, at Bernini’s evocative figures and the water splashing into the basin, the four jets meant to symbolise the world’s four great rivers and, hence, the four corners of the globe; tumbling water, a cascade which — as it was presented on television — reminded him of the waterfalls at home in Norway, the wild landscape of western Norway, the darkness of the water, dangerous forces, the magical powers of the water nixie, the risk of drowning: thoughts which moved him to drink more white wine, get even drunker. And in Jonas Wergeland’s rendering it was here, while looking at this fountain, that Ibsen conceived his ‘A verse’ — not printed until years later — which was recited as the screen darkened: ‘To live is — to do battle with trolls / in the vaults of the heart and the mind. / To write is — to sit in judgement on oneself.’
Henrik Ibsen got to his feet, a mite unsteadily, and wove off into the shadows as the sound of bubbling water intensified. The next shot showed the writer standing in a massive doorway, the next again in some dark place, a cave — a studio set conjured into existence by NRK’s best carpenters and designers. To the viewers it looked as though Ibsen had stepped inside his own brain or the vaults of his heart, and truly did have to do battle in there with trolls and dwarfs. They saw the writer being hunted, tormented, saw Ibsen’s innermost worries swarming around him in the form of ghosts: ‘You’re not Knud Ibsen’s son!’ snorted a gnome. ‘Why do you deny me?’ asked a father. Elves danced around Ibsen, chanting that he was bankrupt, bankrupt. A girl waved a poem at him, crying that he had broken their engagement; a policeman appeared to arrest him and take him off to do hard labour at Akershus Fort. ‘You have lost your faith in God,’ hissed a troll. The most distinct and most oft-recurring figures were, however, a woman and her son, a child whom one understood to be Ibsen’s own, the boy he had, at the age of eighteen, fathered on a serving maid in Grimstad ten years his senior. Henrik Ibsen sat in judgement on himself. His face bore the marks of pride and a passionate will, and of guilt, shame, pain and sorrow. His lips moved. Jonas Wergeland inserted a quote from Brand, the play on which Ibsen was then working: ‘O, endless the atonement here. — / In such confused and tangled state, the thousand twisted strands of fate’, and ended with Brand’s cry at the end of the third act: ‘Give me light!’
And as Henrik Ibsen raised his head, the whole scene opened out. In a stunning dissolve, Jonas Wergeland had the surroundings change from the hall of the Mountain King to the interior of a church, St Peter’s Basilica itself. Through Ibsen’s eyes one gazed straight up at Michelangelo’s breathtakingly high dome. A ray of light streamed down on him, and to viewers at home it seemed that the light alone brought the writer to his knees.
Jonas Wergeland held this shot for a long time, an eternity in viewers’ memories: Henrik Ibsen, the greatest of all Norwegian writers, on his knees under that vast dome, that prodigiously ambitious span, on his knees before the papal altar, under Bernini’s bronze canopy, right next to the steps leading down to the tomb of St Peter, the rock on which the whole Christian church was founded, while all around him the light grew stronger and stronger. It was a provocative image, an image which, for many, accorded badly with the Ibsen they knew: a stubborn, antagonistic character who could not write unless bristling with resentment. But to Jonas Wergeland, this was where all of Ibsen’s future masterpieces had their beginnings: with him kneeling, humbly, under a cupola, in a church.
According to the programme’s version of events, Henrik Ibsen was, at this point, a disheartened man, plagued by thoughts of betrayal in his life and his art; a man who, in sitting in judgement on himself, was bound to find himself guilty. But on his knees under the dome of St Peter’s, under the image of the Almighty himself, he met with compassion, or rather: he was granted — like a gift for which he had not asked — forgiveness; he was set free. Brand was in all ways a reflection of this experience. Just as Ibsen had sacrificed a woman, Else Sophie from Grimstad, and the child he had with her, so too Brand sacrificed, ruthlessly, tragically, his wife and his son, and yet Ibsen concludes the play with a last line proclaiming: ‘He is deus caritatis!’ He is the God of love.
In St Peter’s, Ibsen found a light, a relief and a release which also rendered him receptive to the inspiration and, hence, the creativity which great art can bestow. The barbarians came to Ancient Rome and were civilised. So, too with Henrik Ibsen. Brand — the new, revised, visionary play, that is — was in many ways a response to the works of art in St Peter’s. Most of all to the dome. Michelangelo’s mighty vault gave Ibsen courage, the courage to give his imagination wing. To go out on a limb. The courage to go against the accepted taste, the courage to do something crazy. To say: On the contrary. All or nothing. The works of art in that church, and everywhere else in Rome, did not merely provide him with a new yardstick, they also prompted him to ask himself another question: what is a man. It was here, in St Peter’s Basilica, that Ibsen made up his mind to be a person who asked questions rather than one who answered them. It was here that he began to perceive the possibility of depicting people as no one before him had done.
Through Ibsen’s eyes, television viewers saw him discover the key to his future works. Looking up, he caught sight of the four large mosaic medallions at the four corners of the dome: the four evangelists, four writers, each of whom had presented his version of one man’s life. Ibsen may also have been reminded of the four rivers represented in Bernini’s fountain on the Piazza Navona. He had a vision: he was standing at the intersection point of four powerful spotlight beams, could feel their influence flowing through him, his mind could run in four directions at once. And at that very moment — so Jonas Wergeland postulated — it came to him, the idea of writing four different versions, four stories about the same man, only he would give him four different names: Skule, whom he had already portrayed, Brand, Peer and Julian. Four characters. And yet one. Presenting, when seen together, a picture of Mankind, its depth and its breadth.
Beneath that boundary-breaking cupola in Rome, Henrik Ibsen was liberated from his stunted self. He was free to become someone else, also as a writer. Henrik Ibsen had been transformed. He had blundered into St Peter’s as a troll, enough in himself, and walked out a man.
Jonas Wergeland was, as it happens, firmly convinced that Ibsen’s latterly so renowned sphinx-like countenance, his aloof demeanour was a mask he assumed to save revealing anything of his Caritas moment.