Did critics enjoy An Enemy of the People?

Holly Williams, WhatsOnStage

★★★

"Bonneville gives a solid, very human performance, but you identify with his plight, rather than having the sense of watching a towering figure… Still, after 12 years away from the stage, having been busy bounding around with Labradors in Downton Abbey and the like, it's a welcome return."

"The play may seem to speak to us about our own times, but that's what the audience brings to it: the production itself fails to really make the case. There's not quite enough oomph; An Enemy of the People makes a bold argument for being bold, yet this production feels rather well-behaved."

Michael Billington, The Guardian

★★★★

"In the early scenes, [Bonneville's] Stockmann is wreathed in naive self-certainty. [He] beams like a baby on being told that his analysis of the baths is a masterpiece, vainly imagines the torchlit processions he will receive and hurls himself violently at unsuspecting sofas when thwarted."

"Davies, using Christopher Hampton’s faithful translation, shrewdly adopts a middle course by setting the play in what I took to be the 1940s, with suits for the men, felt hats and slacks for the women."

"Not even Hampton’s version can conceal the fact that the women, unusually for Ibsen, are more thinly conceived, but Abigail Cruttenden conveys the far-sighted practicality of Stockmann’s wife and Alice Orr-Ewing lends his daughter a touch of fire."

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph

★★★

"This is Ibsen’s most unyielding, most inspiring and arguably most autobiographical hero; furious at the reproving reception meted out to Ghosts, which scandalised Scandinavia with its evocation of the inherited miseries of a faithless marriage, the playwright fought back swiftly with an archetypal figure of crusading individualism."

"Bonneville gives a serviceable sense of the fraught journey of an upright citizen who takes it as read that the facts will speak for themselves and is aghast to discover he’s expected to lie for the common good."

"What’s missing is the kind of febrile intensity that Ian McKellen found in the part when this same version – by Christopher Hampton – was first presented at the National in 1997."

Fiona Mountford, The Evening Standard

★★★

"Whatever other flaws this production might have, Bonneville gives a wholehearted and consistently watchable performance."

"The big danger of this play is that the dramatis personae can too easily seem more like viewpoints than fully rounded characters, and director Howard Davies, usually the unsurpassed master of ensemble naturalism, doesn’t avoid every pitfall, especially in a whistle-stop first half."

"This rendering misses by some margin the towering gravitas of the National’s seminal 1997 version starring Ian McKellen."

Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail

"Chichester audiences should enjoy this richly-staged production. The entourage is of a high calibre and Howard Davies’s direction is assured. There is a particularly good crowd scene, the citizenry shouting from the auditorium’s aisles. We see that the line between mob rule and democracy is indeed a slender one.

"Theatregoers may be drawn primarily by the presence of Mr Bonneville. He delivers a commanding performance when Stockmann is the affable, confident father. He becomes marginally less convincing when Stockmann wobbles and weeps; yet here is an actor with distinct stage presence."

"Director Davies, making handsome use of Chichester’s large stage, sets this production in the 1930s or 1940s: trilbys, flapper hats, one of the women in high- waist trousers.
This makes for a handsome spectacle but there is a danger in modernising the tale. For we might start asking ‘where, Mr Ibsen, are the lawyers?’"

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An Enemy of the People is at Chichester Festival Theatre until 21 May.