Once a problem play, always a problem play?

Photographer: Keith Pattison

By MICHAEL CAINES

It’s a notorious moment: in the fourth act of his flawed yet fascinating play An Enemy of the People, Ibsen has the protagonist, Dr Thomas Stockmann, denounce the rule of the majority. It’s the elite who should rule.

You can guess where this kind of talk will lead. At the Young Vic, where the play is currently running in a new version by David Harrower, under the pithier, more Cagney-esque title Public Enemy, Stockmann ends up giving a Nazi salute, and telling the audience: “You should be exterminated like vermin, all of you, before you poison the whole country . . .”.

As Arthur Miller put it, however, prefacing his own alteration of the play for the age of McCarthyism, the speech has to be understood in a structural context: “in some important respects”, it contradicts “the actual dramatic working-out of the play”.

The town where Stockmann lives depends on the summer visitors to its famed public baths for its living, but the doctor has discovered that the water supply is contaminated and, far from making people better, is more likely to kill them off. The town, sure enough, won’t have it, driving him, out of sheer frustration, to condemn them for thinking that they know better than him. The majority of people may have might on their side, he declares, but they are never right. Only a (smarter) minority may be right. The politicians and the press, meanwhile, call the tune for the ignorant masses to follow. The truth doesn’t stand a chance against this alliance of ignorance and megalomania.

Since Stockmann is addressing a public meeting at this point, the atmosphere turns distinctly nasty; his wife Katrina suggests that they leave by the back door.

All too easily lost in the mêlée is Ibsen’s real point: that there is not an “aristocracy of birth, or of the purse, or even . . . of the intellect” but an “aristocracy of character, of will, of mind – that alone can free us”. But this is to quote Miller quoting Ibsen speaking at a real public meeting, a workers’ club, and it offers the later playwright a congenial justification for excising “those examples which no longer prove the theme – examples I believe Ibsen would have removed were he alive today”. “The man who wrote A Doll’s House, the clarion call for the equality of women, cannot be equated with a fascist.”

Stockmann’s intellectual elitism has always disconcerted theatre audiences and critics: not everybody has shared Miller’s convictions that Ibsen is in the right. And the reviewers often take the big speech to be the most significant part of the play.

As staged by Jones, Stockmann (charismatically, likeably played by Nick Fletcher) delivers his rant to the Young Vic audience itself, hogging the microphone (we’re in a mid-twentieth-century Norway here, not the 1880s), rather than haranguing a crowd on stage. “If this is what you get by voting for them”, he says of the politicians, “don’t vote! Keep your dignity. . . I never vote.” Fletcher retains a certain flexible liveliness here, as though he really were making an impromptu speech – rephrasing when he jumbles his words, saying “bless you” to an unscripted interruption from the audience.

The press night crowd know how to behave; they don’t respond to the rhetorical questions which he presses on us. But imagine the critics sitting there, confronted with this supposedly transformed man (in fact, the spirit of individualism and its attendant dangers are plain from the start) condemning them as the "enemies of truth"; it seems to have been rather difficult after that to apply the kind of clear thinking about context that allowed Miller to see through the ranting.

No wonder they have to identify Stockmann's big speech as a “Brechtian coup de théâtre”, the speech of a “disillusioned prophet in his own country, turned crazed proto-fascist”. Or as a “breathtaking assault on democracy” through which the director, Richard Jones, rejects “maverick individualism” along with “endemic complacency” – a speech that “hovers between absolute candidness and repellent megalomania”. “At best he is arguing for greater personal responsibility; clearly what he’s really advocating is closer to fascism.”

There’s nothing new in this uneasiness about the play (once a problem play, always a problem play?), nor in the idea that it’s entertaining despite its apparent faults. Ibsen intended An Enemy of the People as an immediate riposte to the majority view of its predecessor, Ghosts (1882), and its supposed indecency (viz, daring to raise the moral problem of marriage again, after A Doll’s House, and the related medical problem of hereditary syphilis). If Ghosts was, as one newspaper had it, an “open drain”, An Enemy of the People embraces the same metaphor of pollution. Controversy is its natural element.

Ibsen himself didn’t know exactly what he’d written. Was it a comedy or a serious drama? And once the play came over to England, the critics couldn’t work it out, either. One anonymous reviewer of a public reading of the play at the Haymarket Theatre in 1890 thought that the dialogue was “pithy and epigrammatic” but that the play would not succeed in England as an “acting drama”. Another thought it “rather commonplace” for anyone but the Ibsen devotee. A third, incredibly, called it “absolutely wholesome and breezy from end to end”; it’s the Ibsen play that “may fearlessly be produced before an English audience verbatim et literatim”.

That leap into madness in Act Four made a disturbing impression on twentieth-century critics, too. Charles Morgan (whose selected reviews will be reviewed in turn in a future issue of the TLS), in 1928, thought it dubious in its refusal to distinguish between democracy in politics and, say, medicine (Stockmann's is clearly a one-doctor town). James Agate, in 1939, could hardly help seeing in the outgunned protagonist’s attack on the rule of the majority a foretaste of “Democracy’s quarrel with Dictatorship”. At least it had been “an intensely exciting evening” at the Old Vic. More recently, at the National Theatre in 1997, in Trevor Nunn’s staging of a version by Christopher Hampton, the TLS’s reviewer Peter Kemp observed that Ian McKellen avoided turning Stockmann into a “caricature” – “an incipient Fuehrer of the fjords” – “by making it clear that Stockmann is goaded into overstatement by the storm of execration he has provoked”. And only a few years ago, there was a production at the Arcola that got it wrong, according to John Peter, by representing Stockmann as a kind of freedom fighter, instead of a monster created by the majority and their “cosy supremacy”.

One of the few new points to emerge since the 1970s is that the play lies behind Stephen Spielberg’s film Jaws. But there the equivalent Stockmann character at least gets to say “I told you so; there’s something in the water . . . .”