An Enemy of the People

Synopsis

Dr Stockmann attempts to expose a water pollution scandal in his home town - about to set itself up as a spa - but his brother conspires with newspapers and politicians to suppress the story. When Stockmann tries to put over his story at a public meeting he is reviled as an `enemy of the people'.

Our Review:

7 April 2008

“The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone.” That is the proud cry of Thomas Stockmann, ostracised in his own community, at the end of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Stockmann has discovered that the baths on which the small coastal town’s prosperity rests are contaminated. He refuses to accept that half measures might solve the problem.

At the Arcola, Greg Hicks goes beyond the usual resonating trumpet call to suggest notes of insanity. The cost of his “aloneness” will be a sort of provincial madness as his contempt for the mob – in Ibsen’s great fourth act, the public meeting, Hicks reawakens his own scathing RSC Coriolanus – crumbles with the realisation of the personal cost involved.

The Arcola’s Ibsen Season is fast off the blocks, so fast in fact that Mehmet Ergen’s production is all over in barely two hours, ten minutes. Working from a literal translation by Charlotte Barslund, playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz has provided a text that is snappy an...

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