Enemy of the People

The Guthrie Theater adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's brilliant and immensely influential play En Folkefiende, as adapted by the Welsh-British playwright, Brad Birch, is a wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am rocket.  The director, Lyndsey Turner, brings in the play at just under one-hour and forty minutes with no intermission -- this is hard on the bladders of the superannuated theatergoers who now comprise the Guthrie's core audience.  Performed on the McGuire Proscenium stage, the proceedings are, further, streamlined by a series of sets on a huge rotating Lazy Susan -- when one scene is over, a character wanders sideways, dodging the big walls that swoop this way and that, stepping  into the next scene without interruption.  The effect is cinematic, like a tracking shot in a movie, and brilliant enough, although everything happens so fast and so efficiently that the audience really doesn 't have any time to think.  The play's text has been severely edited and, at least, half the characters eliminated -- it's like watching a Reader's Digest condensed version of the Ibsen play, a kind of anthology of greatest hits extracted from the Norwegian writer's book with little or no concern for the original text.  In fact, Birch shows little or no concern for his own libretto -- I perused a copy of his adaptation of the play, printed perversely under the Norwegian title, a very richly musical phrase, and noticed that the final couple scenes as printed in the booklet bore no resemblance to what we saw on stage.  Ibsen is a great playwright and, I think, that one tampers with his work at one's own risk -- unless you think you're a better writer than Ibsen, you shouldn't mess with his texts.  And, yet, for some reason, American and British writers seems to feel licensed to take enormous liberties with Ibsen's plays -- Wally Shawn distorted much of A Master Builder in the film version of Shawn's adaptation as directed by Andre Gregory (the film is great but deviates substantially from Ibsen); the adaptations of Ibsen that I saw at the Lanesboro Commonweal theater were similarly much mutilated -- the original text was used as a source of inspiration but characters were changed, several figures condensed into one, and seemingly about the half the plays omitted.  The Guthrie Theater's version of Enemy of the People is so remote from Ibsen's text that, in my view, it is fraud to advertise the thing as an Ibsen play -- rather, it is a clever, modernist exploration of themes developed in Ibsen's theater-piece.

Ibsen's text interweaves a family drama with a political dilemma.  A geologist who has come to direct a hot springs integral to the economy of a remote Norwegian village discovers that the supposedly salubrious and healing waters are, in fact, contaminated and, indeed, poisonous.  He tries to publicize the situation but, ultimately, discovers that no one really cares much about the truth.  The springs are too valuable to the town's well being and the hero doesn't succeed in forcing the corporation that has financed the restoration of the springs (using cheap and dangerous piping) to remedy the problem.  The play stands for a dangerous proposition:  Truth is what the Will to Power declares the Truth to be.  Thus, the most powerful and wealthy forces in society are entitled to foist their version of truth on the Demos -- Ibsen is critical of democracy; he sees that form of government as a kind of mob rule that leads to the malleability of the truth.  The truth is either what a wealthy and powerful figure orders us to believe ("alternative facts") or what the majority of the mob believes.  These issues are debated, at length, in the play and, after some development in the first half of the Guthrie production, also argued in the last 45 minutes of that show.  The play's diction has been altered to opportunistically exploit Donald Trump's election and the American President's relationship to the Truth -- at times, the audience gasped when it heard about "alternative facts" and the Press being the "enemy of the people."  But tying the show so explicitly to the American political situation cheapens the drama and, also, undermines Ibsen's genuinely subversive ideas:  sometimes, Ibsen argues, the Truth is not just unpalatable but wholly destructive -- there are circumstances in which the literal truth must be sacrificed for the common good.  This is a  highly debatable proposition and provides the dialectical fireworks in Ibsen's play -- the original text doesn't end satisfactorily because Ibsen doesn't (and can't) reconcile the differing positions about truth and expediency raised by his characters.  The Guthrie production undercuts half of the argument by overtly connecting it to Donald Trump's idiotic pronouncements.  In fact, there's an argument for "alternate facts" that is more profound, as Ibsen recognizes -- sometimes the Truth is harmful.  The Cliff Notes version of Enemy of the People presented by the Guthrie stages two long dialogues on this issue and, then, literally fills the auditorium with haze and smoke, objectifying in a very obvious (and annoying) way, the confusing status of the truth, the murkiness of the morality involved, and the general ethical and philosophical cloudiness of the questions raised.  The hero burns a symbolic tree (it signifies his integrity and sense of being blessed by his relationship with nature -- science after all is a relationship with nature characterized by Truth.)  The audience is drowned in smoke and haze and nothing, of course, is established one way of the other. 

The scenario is baffling in several respects.  There's a subplot about a writer suffering from writer's block that seems unrelated to the subject matter of the play -- the writer is attempting to analyze the world from the point of view of olfactory evidence, that is the perspective of a dog.  I suppose an ingenious critic could connect this subplot, which also involves the scientist's college-age daughter Petra, to the main theme -- but it seemed too remote for me to attempt making this connection.  The subplot with the writer is uninteresting and goes nowhere.  A character in the first scene, forgotten for the next 110 minutes of the play, is resurrected for the final scene -- this seems like a kind of cheat.  Petra, the scientist's daughter, is used more as a symbol for thwarted hope and happiness than as an actual character -- she wanders around carrying balloons that seem to have a meaning about her aspirations for a better life.  But her discouragement about college and her drunkenness seem like something from a Chekhov play -- she's like the girl in The Sea Gull who wears black, as she says "in mourning for my life."  Ibsen complicated the simple plot of the noble scientist opposing the mob with a nuanced, and tedious, I'm afraid, series of countervailing subplots and debate.  The Guthrie show simplifies the plot to the point of making it seems idiotically schematic but, then, at the last moment reverts to complexity -- hence, the smokescreen at the end of the play.  But the smokescreen doesn't equate to an actual debate about anything significant -- it really just demonstrates that the adaptor traducing Ibsen's play has gotten himself (and his audience) confused.