By Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
An Enemy of the People
By Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Florian Borchmeyer, Schaubuhne Berlin
Arts Centre, until October 27
SCHAUBUHNE Berlin returns to the Melbourne Festival performing Ibsen for the second year in a row.
An Enemy of the People is sensitively directed and suavely performed.
If Thomas Ostermeier's Hedda Gabler brought the clock forward while preserving the ambiguity of whether the play is a tragedy, An Enemy of the People does something similar.
Ibsen's tale of industrial pollution, institutional corruption and social conformity - of one man standing, almost cartoonish in his idealism, against a sinister web of vested interests - has become such a familiar story, from Enron to Fukushima. This production surfs a wave between understated drama and comedy of the blackest kind that implicates us all.
In a rock'n'roll twist, Dr Stockmann (Stefan Stern) is a member of a garage band. He, his wife (Eva Meckbach) and new baby get domestic in a space overrun by impromptu jam sessions. It's a gambit that generates much low-key humour and an unspoken sense of solidarity.
When Stockmann discovers that the town's main attraction - a health spa - contains toxic contaminants, and he is determined to close it down, that solidarity melts away in the corrosive corporate presence of his brother, the town mayor (Ingo Hulsmann). Weasel words and expedient excuses, intimidation tactics and spin turn the town against Stockmann.
It's a simple and wonderfully effective idea to open the town hall meeting where the brothers confront each other to audience participation. Melbourne went for it on opening night, throwing everything at the actors, including a curly question about the Victorian government's desalination plant. Stockmann's declamatory speeches strike at the root of capitalism with eloquent zeal.
The final sequence tightens the noose, ending on a twilit moment where the choice between material comfort and moral action crystallises.
An Enemy of the People is sensitively directed and suavely performed. It drives Ibsen's drama effortlessly into an era of iPods and global financial crises, teasing out the audience's complicity in social evils which, almost 150 years on, we still see around us.