An Enemy of the People, Nottingham Playhouse, review: an Ibsen reworking as overheated and confused as our nation
An Enemy of the People is a play for our times, and not just because Trump once used its title in a tweet. Ibsen wrote this 1882 drama about a whistleblowing doctor as an angry response to the liberal press, who had reacted in horror to his previous play, Ghosts, for daring to depict syphilis on stage, and it remains a meaty attack on the hot air of moral outrage and the dangers of exploiting populism by both the left and the right to achieve political ends. No wonder it’s rarely off our stages: recent revivals have included one at Chichester and a highly acclaimed audience participation version by Thomas Ostermeier.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz certainly seems to like it: this is her second adaptation. Alex Kingston plays Dr Stockmann, the chief medical officer of the town spa who discovers that the waters on which the town depends are poisoned and, with sanctimonious – and feminist – purpose, determines to take on the town’s bureaucrats by going public.
Ibsen makes Stockmann hard to like and Kingston, as she smugly bats off praise from her adoring family in her chic apartment – kitted out in Adam Penford’s modern-dress production with modish Scandi soft furnishings – radiates the wired, self aggrandising energy of the truly self righteous. Such passion, however, combusts appallingly when her detested brother, the local mayor, a sinisterly lugubrious Malcolm Sinclair who is able to make even a word like “logistics” sound like a threat, threatens to sack her unless she retracts.
The editor of the local press, meanwhile, is initially on her side (partly because she fancies Stockmann’s daughter). But she abruptly switches when she realises that the town’s readership will never buy into the scandal when they grasp it’s they who will have to pay for the clean up, whereupon Stockmann goes on a reactionary rampage, laying into the people for being too stupid to know what’s good for them.
You don’t need to look too hard here to find parallels with a Brexit-divided Britain disfigured by competing self interest as Stockmann and Emma Pallant’s editor, who sucks on cigarettes and coffee in the timeless depiction of newspaper editors everywhere, claim they have the mandate of the people for their respective positions. Yet Lenkiewicz overeggs the pudding with references to food banks, rising immigration, fake news, endless mention of “the majority” and even, at one point, a real egg. (Note to playwrights: adding f*** to every other sentence isn’t thrilling, either, merely tiresome.)
Ibsen cleverly shows how an accelerating argument can carry its proponents to adopt ever more extreme positions, but Kingston’s relentlessly high-pitched performance skates over the various contradictions of Stockmann’s character and can’t find a clear way to explain precisely how she ends up where she does. The final showdown in the town square, when everyone is screaming incoherently at each other, is just ugly to behold. This may be an accurate reflection of the state of public discourse in Britain today, but it also reflects an overheated, confused production that seems unsure of who or what the enemy really is.
Until Sep 28. Nottingham Playhouse. Tickets: 0115 941 9419; nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk
