An Enemy of the People: Matt Smith stars in play that combines Ibsen with Question Time
This modern retelling of Ibsen’s seminal work about the corrupting influence of power begins with a live, indie performance of Hounds of Love. Watching the play’s characters earnestly jamming together sets the tone nicely for a solidly acted first half that has the air of an ITV drama (which in this age of Mr Bates vs The Post Office is not intended as a criticism).
The tale of a small-town medical officer who discovers that the local economy-sustaining spa is contaminated is transplanted from Norway to England but aside that the story beats remain the same. Matt Smith’s Thomas Stockmann is a principled but egotistical doctor who would see the world burn just to be proven right. His brother is the pragmatic local mayor who would see Stockmann burn to save the spa, and by extension his job. There’s a local newspaperman who will burn anyone in order to publish Stockmann’s damning report, until he realises the spa singlehandedly sustains his job. And so on and so on and so on.
Repeated use of contemporary phrases like “drain the swamp” and “woke” feel a little jarring but beyond that German director Thomas Ostermeier’s production, performed in English for the first time, captures well the message that even seemingly straightforward moral decisions become impossibly complex when competing interests collide.
It all takes place on a sparse set, the walls of which are essentially giant chalkboards upon which rooms and props are sketched out in chalk. When a character wants to turn the radio down, she draws it on the wall and twists the knob. It’s neat, although I’m not sure it has any significance beyond that.
It’s a tight and well acted – if not particularly memorable – hour of theatre, which begs the question of what attracted Matt Smith to the role. That question is answered in the second half, which is a marked departure from the first.
As in the original play, it takes the form of a public address, with Smith performing a fist-pumping, five minute monologue that takes aim first at the town, then the wider world, complaining about everything from “turning the planet into one big Amazon warehouse” to the state of the NHS, before veering into even spicier territory with a sidebar about how “the greatest enemy of truth is the liberal majority”.
Then suddenly the audience is in an episode of Question Time, with a microphone handed around, allowing anyone who fancies it to ask a question or voice an opinion. It demonstrates the cast’s ability to roll with the punches of improvisation but, on the night I was there, nobody had anything particularly insightful to say.
An Enemy of the People is certainly ambitious and the themes of both the 142-year-old play and this ten-year-old production feel depressingly relevant. But a production with a gimmick this big lives or dies upon that gimmick, and I struggle to see what audience participation adds to this otherwise solid evening of theatre.
• An Enemy of the Poeple is on at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 13 April