How Ibsen predicted everything that’s wrong with 2024

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen – Culture Club/Getty Images

This month, two high-profile actors are spearheading revivals of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People on either side of the Atlantic. In the West End, Matt Smith stars in a production by the feted German director Thomas Ostermeier that was first done at Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre. On Broadway, Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy from Succession) is in a new version by Amy Herzog.

On one level, it’s a coincidence. On another, a valuable indication of the play’s relevance and, arguably, its peerless anticipation of our times. The pair are tackling one of the greatest male roles Ibsen wrote: Dr Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer in a Norwegian spa town who crystallises the predicament of a citizen speaking up about an inconvenient truth in the face of a censorious chorus of disapproval.

Stockmann causes a stink about the pollution that has turned the tourist-attracting spa water into a health hazard but he runs up against the vested interest of the mayor (his brother), the cravenness of the press and the wrath of the townsfolk.

What starts as a quest to ensure the community cleans up its act, despite crippling costs, becomes a battle between conscience and conformity – he suffers denunciation as ‘an enemy of the people’, loses his work and faces ruin. “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone,” he says at the end, defiantly.

Despite An Enemy of the People being written in 1882, Ibsen’s play looks topical and even prescient, summing up the claustrophobic state we’re in, where orthodox positions are enforced by closed-ranks and approved mindsets and dissenting voices battle the social media din.

Matt Smith will star in a production of An Enemy of the People at the Duke of York’s Theatre – Maarten de Boer/Getty Images Portrait

Of course, the environmental aspect itself makes the work seem timely. Ostermeier tells me that the play’s resurgence doesn’t surprise him. “Ibsen shows patterns and mechanisms within a Norwegian 19^th-century town, as if under a microscope. These processes can be applied to today’s questions about the fight for environmental protection versus the lobbyist defence of economic interests and democratic participation versus individual activist commitment.”

With concern about (and arguments around) climate change now at fever-pitch, Stockmann is the perfect protagonist for the Greta Thunberg generation, given the eco-minded nature of his whistle-blowing mission. Ostermeier spells this out: “The play raises the important question: what chance do we have of taking effective action against the threat posed by climate change if we’re dependent on the democratic legitimisation of unpopular decisions? How can majorities be found in favour of measures that impose serious restrictions on us?” The stakes are in effect global. “When these questions are asked, Ibsen’s spa resort becomes the world.”

The play’s particular pertinence, though, is bound up with the outlook of Stockmann himself. He’s not solely a campaigner in the Erin Brockovich mould but also, on a broadly applicable level, a critic of societal failure. You could even argue, contrarily, that he is a kindred spirit of those who’d challenge the Net Zero consensus. He regards society as being built on a “cesspit of lies”, and in damning the unenlightened majority he also takes aim at the liberal intelligentsia and its group-think: “You get grown men of liberal inclinations getting together in groups and convincing themselves and other people that they’re progressive thinkers” to quote the translation by Ibsen biographer Michael Meyer.

Ian McKellen in An Enemy of the People, at the Royal National Theatre – robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images

This is in line with Ibsen’s views. He was more upset at being pilloried by the liberal left than by the conservative right for his initially rejected masterpiece Ghosts (published in 1881), which, in addressing social hypocrisy, syphilis, domestic abuse, incest and euthanasia caused a public outcry. So scandalous was its dramatic revelation of inherited venereal disease that no major Scandinavian playhouse would touch it (it premiered in Chicago) and its published text barely sold. “What is one to say of the attitude taken by the so-called liberal press?” he railed in a letter in 1882. “These leaders who talk and write of freedom and progress, and at the same time allow themselves to be the slaves of the supposed opinions of their subscribers?”

Ostermeier disputes the idea that Ibsen is writing about ‘cancel culture’ avant la lettre – “his inconvenient truth is defamed as fake news” is his line; but to borrow another buzz-phrase, at the very least you could say that Stockmann is ‘deplatformed’, hounded out as he is from a public meeting. In the same letter, Ibsen added: “In the course of their worthy efforts to turn our country into a democratic community, people have unwittingly gone a good way towards turning us into a mob community. The aristocracy of the intellect seems to be in short supply.”

That last phrase is certainly problematic and finds expression in an unsavoury side to Stockman that’s elitist – and has a eugenicist outlook. That’s one reason, though, why the play is more richly ambiguous than it at first appears, testing sympathies as our hero’s rational analysis tilts into arrogant self-righteousness. Rather like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, an obvious artistic influence, Stockmann’s growing implacability resembles a tragic flaw as he heads into confrontation with his fellow citizens.

An Enemy of the People: Jonathan Cullen as Aslaksen, Hugh Bonneville as Dr Stockmann – Alastair Muir

Of course, ‘enemy of the people’ was a trope of the hard-left, notoriously in Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. But it’s a phrase bandied about on the right too, and not just the Nazis. Trump famously accused the press of being “an enemy of the American people” in 2017, and a year earlier The Mail ran a front-page decrying the three High Court judges who ruled that parliament had to approve the triggering of Article 50, thereby regaining its control of the Brexit process. “Enemies of the people” ran the headline.

That sense of contested terrain is harnessed by Ostermeier’s production, which breaks the fourth wall in the town hall scene (Act IV) to invite audience contributions. When the production opened in China in 2018, this was so contentious that it got cancelled. Are we more open to hearing unpalatable truths here? At the Barbican in 2014, (Ostermeier’s original production with German surtitles), “Rotherham”, and its scandal around grooming gangs, was reportedly mooted as a topic of debate – the audience may well be more loudly vocal on a heap of issues in 2024.

Perhaps there will never be quite the same excitement as attended the play in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1905, the great actor and director Stanislavski, who deemed Stockmann his favourite character, recorded the febrile mood at the Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of the Tsarist massacre at Kazanskaya Square in St Petersburg (“Bloody Sunday”). The line “One should never put on a new coat when going to fight for freedom and truth”.. “aroused”, he recalled, “such pandemonium that we had to stop the performance… I could see hundreds of hands stretched towards me”. Could that happen here? It might sound fanciful but given the volatility of our times, who knows what the play may yet provoke?

‘An Enemy of the People’ runs from Feb 6 to April 6 at the Duke of York’s; anenemyofthepeople.co.uk

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