AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Chichester Festival Theatre
Opened 4 May, 2016
****

The poster for Howard Davies’ Chichester revival of An Enemy Of The People describes it as “the thrilling Ibsen play”. My first response was amusement: Ibsen is clever, intricate and eloquent, but thrilling? Seldom. On reflection, however, one of the skills he demonstrates in several of his greatest plays – Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, A Doll’s House – is to entangle his protagonists in an ever-tightening snare, a web of malice and/or misfortune. Dr Tomas Stockmann here is probably the most entangled of all: various vested interests in the spa town where he lives and works first stir up the community to repudiate his report on bacteria in the water of the baths, then, when he and his family have been ostracised, each of these parties attempts to extort a particular kind of compliance from him, such that he cannot satisfy any two of them and faces ruin whichever way he turns.

Additional thrills come in the penultimate scene, the public meeting at which Stockmann is stitched up like a crude sampler. Some productions go as far as to open up this meeting to the audience; Davies goes halfway along that route to ensure that the currents of this meeting run throughout the Festival Theatre, by sowing over 30 townspeople-extras along all the aisles, muttering, heckling and almost fighting amongst themselves.

Stockmann’s principal nemesis, the mayor, is his own brother; William Gaminara makes a dignified spider weaving his malevolent web. However, Stockmann himself is sometimes little better, beset by a slightly comical intellectual vanity which, when stymied, leads him to rage like Lear. Hugh Bonneville abseils a few levels down the social scale from his earldom in Downton Abbey, and portrays well both Stockmann’s immature relish when he believes he has the upper hand and his impotent fury when the tables are turned. Adam James is the hard-edged newspaper editor, with Michael Fox as his absurdly revolutionary deputy and Jonathan Cullen adeptly finding the villainy beneath the humour as the pathologically “moderate” printer. Both in its theme of the shameful ways in which we allow self-interest to override the truth and in Davies’ staging, I am persuaded that “thrilling” is not a misnomer.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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