An Enemy of the People – Duke of York’s Theatre

This radical shakeup of Ibsen’s 1882 play about a doctor who blows the whistle on the local, lucrative spa baths when he discovers the water is dangerously contaminated, is an all-too-familiar conflict between morality and economics. Even in the original, it’s Ibsen at his most prescient and, adapted by director Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer the play hits even harder.

Matt Smith is a younger Doctor Thomas Stockman than usual. Smith’s version is a good looking, confident young father of a new baby with youthful vigour and love of truth and it’s perfect casting. The contrast with his uncharismatic older brother who is mayor of the town (Paul Hinton) and wants it all pragmatically hushed up, works well.

In the second half there’s a public meeting in which Ostermeier moves away from the play as beleaguered Stockman takes the microphone and rants at length about the 2024 world crisis – with audience questions and it feels like a self-indulgent digression.

Jessica Brown Findlay is totally natural and plausible as Stockman’s very reasonable wife, Katharina. And there’s a fine performance from Nigel Lindsay as her gruff, self-interested father. Pryanga Burford is excellent as the calm newspaper proprietor too especially when she’s managing the audience and may have to ad lib.

And yet. It opens with Brown

Findlay hosting band practice at home (Ibsen had that scene as a meal). The music adds little except that it provides a coherent reason for using it to cover later scene changes. It’s also rather fun – although totally irrelevant – to hear Matt Smith sing and to note that Zachary Hart is rather good on the guitar. First staged in Berlin in 2012, it’s a messy show. Set flats (designed by Jan Pappelbaum) are black with white chalking, occasionally amended by cast members. Then they obliterate it all with buckets of white paint, the point of which eluded me. The cynical, ambiguous ending is unimpressive too. Stockman’s moral stance is the whole thrust of the play. He surely won’t give in now.