Like a dramatic Tardis, Henrik Ibsen’s play about whistleblowing, entrenched power and populism crashes for 142 years and lands on the bruised principles of today. A great Matt Smith stars in a dynamic, modern redesign of An enemy of the people by director Thomas Ostermeier of the Schaubühne in Berlin (English version by Duncan Macmillan). The production picks up on Ibsen’s feminism and brightens some gloomy corners with humor. It is an urgent but tendentious rendering of an ambivalent piece.
Public health versus economic security. Institutional openness versus cover-up and distortion. Ibsen’s central concerns could hardly be more timely. Dr. Stockmann (Smith) discovers that the water supply to the municipal baths is contaminated. The arguments for closure are obvious, and Stockmann receives enthusiastic support from journalists – until his brother, a local government official, claims that closure will destroy the city’s new prosperity. The news of contamination disappears.
The action flows along, mainly helped by modernizing accents. A blackboard is whitewashed when information is suppressed; Bowie’s Changes regularly stammers in the background. The performances are natural but tense: the small part of Stockmann’s wife – who gets both a good job and a baby here – is sharply defined by Jessica Brown Findlay; Zachary Hart excels as a gangly turncoat who blocks out unwelcome news with headphones. Smith himself transitions nicely from firm conviction to righteous anger. As he delivers his big speech to the townspeople, Stockmann’s certainty is laced with vanity. His furrowed brow and shining eyes become a little too emphatic: he believes what he says, but he also carries out his convictions.
The storm on the heath is one of the fiercest I have ever seen: flashes of lightning, great claps of thunder
This speech is at the heart of the production, proving its power and exposing a limitation. Smith delivers it directly to the audience, with the house lights on. Audience members are asked to vote for or against – and to comment. I voted in favor without hesitation, but I would have done so with more satisfaction if the arguments had been more evenly distributed: if Paul Hilton’s unofficial brother had been less staunchly sour; if it had been stated more clearly that a financial collapse would lead to social poverty. It was stimulating to hear the audience speak – eloquently condemning and sometimes exploding the state of schools and the NHS. ‘Who said ‘nonsense? Priyanga Burford asked, measuredly with her usual confidence. Afterwards I felt uncomfortable because no one had expressed an opinion that conflicted with mine, and I was too easily part of a consensus. Yet it was the piece that made me question the comfort. Another skewer on a fantastic evening.
There is no comfort in it King Lear, whose destructions – psychic, elemental and social – are on the theatrical plane far removed from Ibsen’s political realism. Yet tragedy can make the audience fly, as in Yaël Farber’s dark and dazzling production.
Danny Sapani’s Lear is impressive, the bass note from which everything comes. The mighty rumble of his voice declares authority; it may seem, like a storm, to be part of the weather itself, but in its distraction it makes it papery and thin. At Cordelia’s death, his “howl” is terrifying, like a trapped creature; not – as so often – an explanation of pain, but the pain itself.
Merle Hensel’s evocative, facilitating design hangs chainmail against a backdrop of brick; they sway like strands of raindrops. The substance is shrouded and melted by Lee Curran’s beautiful dim lighting. There is no realism to keep surrender in check. The storm on the heath is one of the fiercest I have ever seen: flashes of lightning, great claps of thunder. Matthew Tennyson’s Poor Tom is not just a babbling guy with spots on his face, but a man-ghost racing across the stage with a huge layer of polythene billowing out like ectoplasm.
The often difficult aspects of King Lear are given new life, all the more believable because they are played with conviction in a dreamscape. Clarke Peters as the Fool (with an umbrella in his hand that gives him a touch of music hall), is a quirky clown, a true companion, who seems to disappear into Lear himself. Gloria Obianyo saves Cordelia from being one of Shakespeare’s most pill-like women: her refusal to flatter, which could easily look like arrogance, becomes an act of rebellion, in line with the fact that she is the only one of the sisters who carries trousers; when she turns to soldiers, she looks completely warrior.
The Almeida is a small stage, but Farber suggests a large space. Broad sympathy too. The director has spoken of drawing on her South African upbringing when reflecting King Lear as a play in which people must “make houses under heaven.” At the end, the cast gathers around the flames – Lear’s “wheel of fire” – as if in a wild place. Dylan sings A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.
In Double functionJohn Logan, screenwriter of Skyfall And Gladiatorpraised for his Rothko play, Red, now explores painful, productive relationships between film directors and their stars. Alfred Hitchcock claws Tippi Hedren while shooting Marnie; Vincent Price is taken out of the horror ham Witchfinder General by the idealistic director Michael Reeves, who died shortly afterwards at the age of 25.
Jonathan Hyde, Ian McNeice, Rowan Polonski and Joanna Vanderham inhabit their parts lightly without complete mimicry. However, there is nothing light about Logan’s script. Loaded with theories and tantalizing facts, but without momentum, it marches from one debate to another: directors abuse and are themselves commercially limited; difficult off-screen confrontations can yield on-screen gold; fading and rising talents are equally desperate. Echoes between the two couples, whose encounters take place side by side, occasionally interlock, with couples singing the same words, but the parallels do not blend. Background stories are mentioned, but hardly felt. Normally a darts player as a director, Jonathan Kent can do little other than underscore the overly thoughtful script.
Nuggets shine through. The setting – plausibly evoked in Anthony Ward’s design of brown wood and Staffordshire dogs – combines the cottage in which Reeves worked and Hitchcock’s bungalow on the Universal lot, designed as an English cottage. Price borrows his wife’s makeup (he doesn’t have to explain “it’s a mask”!). Hedren wears gloves to cover up her dermatitis. After a surprising revelation, the flawless Grace Kelly is characterized as “splattered with cum”: will you come again?
Star ratings (out of five)
An enemy of the people ★★★★
King Lear ★★★★
Double function ★★