VietNamNet Bridge – In an age of Edward Snowden and Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, no classic play could be more potent than Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People.

A view in An Enemy of the People drama - Photo: James Domingo

In the drama, Thomas Stockmann, as a local doctor, discovers that the spa waters his provincial town depends on to attract tourists are in fact polluted. He expects to be hailed as a hero, and specifically declines in advance to attend any dinners held in his honor. But the forces of profit much prefer he keeps silent, and when he refuses to do so dub him “an enemy of the people”.

The modern parallels were so many that in places my mouth fell open in astonishment. Here were the people, represented by the Mayor (the doctor’s brother), accusing Stockmann of being motivated by vindictiveness and a hatred of authority, with his revelations of the truth certain to lead to “revolution and chaos”. How prescient of Ibsen, writing in 1882!

As with all the greatest playwrights, Ibsen gives the devil some of the best lines. “The people don’t need new ideas,” says the Mayor. “They’re quite happy with the old ones.”

Saigon Players staged this evergreen classic, which is extraordinarily simple in its dramatic opposition of scientific truth and commercial self-interest, in a small but congenial performance space, McSorley’s Square, in HCMC’s District 2. The stage occupied one corner, and the audience sat on two sides of it. The consequent sense of intimacy, and the ideal acoustics, contributed to a very strong theatrical experience, though the production’s real strength lay in masterly performances in the two central roles.

Dale Keys played Thomas Stockmann with an increasingly desperate passion, as the script demands, while Stuart Turner brought a quiet determination to the role of the Mayor, rising to a crescendo of inflammatory eloquence as he began to sense victory over his whistle-blower brother.

The production’s climax was a public meeting which the Mayor comes easily, if craftily, to dominate. The director, Jennifer Dizon Turner, scored a triumph by placing the crowd in a small space that made it seem almost part of the audience. Its vociferous and eventually hysterical support of the Mayor in his demands for “reasonableness” and “discretion”, when these were the very opposite of what the crowd itself was exhibiting, formed the high-point of an extremely impressive evening.

An unexpected feature of the production was the inclusion of live music from a six-piece line-up (flute, horn, bassoon, cello, clarinet and trumpet). Kurt Weill-like in style, it suited the production exceptionally well, and only the moments when snatches of music accompanied climaxes in the text seemed out of place (because they implied that Ibsen’s words were insufficient on their own). This fine music was the creation of Jonathan Scott.

The show fortunately stayed with costumes from the original period, and the sets, though simple, were entirely adequate. This, then, was an outstanding production, without a weak link anywhere, of a play that is as relevant now as the day it was written.

SGT/VNN