An Enemy of the People: Matt Smith gleams with authority – but this ‘modern’ take on Ibsen misses a trick
You’ve got to hand it to Matt Smith. When he chooses his London stage projects, he never goes for the easy option. Instead, in the past decade, we’ve seen him star in an Almeida musical about a serial killer (American Psycho), a devised piece at the Royal Court about an obsessive director (Unreachable) and prior to, and during, the pandemic, a time-slipping, eco-minded two-hander, Lungs, opposite fellow Crown actor Claire Foy at the Old Vic.
Now he returns to the heart of the West End for the first time since 2008 (when he made his pre-Doctor Who break-through as an Oedipally-perturbed posh-boy in That Face). This latest project is a staging of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, as rethought by the German director Thomas Ostermeier. Smith is leading the charge as Dr Thomas Stockmann, the crusading medical officer at the baths of a spa town who tries to alert everyone to the toxicity of the spa water but unites the community against him as the ruinous economic implications become clear.
It’s a part he’s a natural fit for, with his high-brow looks and aura of broodingly intellectual, nay doctorly authority. Stockmann has integrity and fearlessness, adhering to facts, but he also has a rebel’s alienating arrogance, qualities both in evidence in the Act IV showdown, in which he unleashes a damning societal critique, lets slip his elitist outlook and incurs collective wrath.
Ostermeier’s boldest stroke is to throw the debate open to the floor at this point, fielding our input and blurring the boundary between the 19th century scenario and 21st century concerns. I found Stockmann’s updated castigation of our polluted world bang on the money, speaking to our complicity in climate change and the exhausting “mass personalisation and individualisation of every aspect of our lives”.
The polite-ish audience participation doesn’t fully mesh with the dramatic need for a gathering witch-hunt, however, and Stockmann’s up-to-speed analysis also doesn’t quite align with Ostermeier’s barely technological depiction of this backwater. He cleaves to Ibsen’s template of whistleblowing via local-press publication, missing a trick when it comes to incorporating the demented online realm and social media.
The production was first seen (in German, natürlich) in Berlin in 2012, and achieves some unexpected moments of comedy, but it now appears almost restrained when scaled against our rancorously divided age.
The evening can boast plenty of ideas, and the odd gimmick too. The mise-en-scene utilises black-board walls chalked with idiosyncratic graffiti that gets (very literally) white-washed over as the town closes ranks. The jury’s out on the wisdom of assembling Smith and co around a kitchen table to croon pop oddities like David Bowie’s Changes. There’s fine supporting work, even so, from Jessica Brown Findlay as Stockmann’s overlooked wife and Paul Hilton as his overbearing mayoral brother, not above a fraternal tussle.
A play for today, on paper, but the concept could use a digital-era upgrade, and a shot more vigour, to set the world on fire.
Until April 6. Tickets: anenemyofthepeople.co.uk
