This isn’t the first updating of the plot of Ibsen’s play. The best-known is, honestly, Jaws, which replaces the threat posed by tainted water to life and business in a spa town with a great white shark at a beach resort. In both stories, a single man speaks out, only for the town’s civic and commercial powers to stifle him. The difference, of course, is in the ending: unlike in the Spielberg movie, Ibsen’s Dr Stockmann doesn’t harpoon the bacilli. Florian Borchmeyer’s version, for Thomas Ostermeier’s 2012 Berlin Schaubühne production (the latest of Ostermeier’s several visits to the Barbican), principally modernises the language and the milieu. Here, the Stockmanns are thirtysomething Berlin hipster-bourgeois who are in a lo-fi band with a couple of their journalist friends; we see them rehearsing a laid-back version of Bowie’s “Changes”.
    
The play appears a godsend in contemporary terms: if you want a dramatic illustration of how late-capitalist commercial imperatives suppress ethics and even the very concept of fact, here it all is. The middle phase of the play (presented here without an interval, running for two and a half hours), as the noose tightens around Stockmann and his idealism, works a treat. Almost as strong is the final act, with the Stockmanns (Christoph Gawenda and Eva Meckbach) sitting exhausted and cynical as his brother the mayor and their journo ex-friends offer them a way out of ruination, at the price of their integrity.
    
It’s the bit in the middle that doesn’t jell, but this is also the production’s unique selling point. When Stockmann calls a public meeting and delivers a long, rambling speech about the ills of modern society, Borchmeyer draws his text from the anonymous 2007 French tract The Coming Insurrection. Where it emerges from abstract woolliness it’s strongly at odds with the model of individual-v.-society that Ibsen has set up. Moreover, the production raises the house lights and encourages us to join in the debate. Well, that’s pretty much going to be a lottery from night to night; at the performance I attended, we progressed from timid beginnings through middle-class-radical nostrums to rehashing the Scottish referendum and then ending in flippancy before the company returned to the script. I can see that it might work, but particularly with an English audience I fear the likelihood is low, and even then you still have the contradictory update left to untangle.
    
Written for the Financial Times.