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.