Why we can't follow the science
A review of Thomas Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People
The last time I saw a Henrik Ibsen play, British politics was in uproar. Theresa May had just resigned as prime minister, and the following autumn Boris Johnson’s government flirted with collapse while a radical remain campaign sought to overturn the Brexit referendum. Only a general election, reluctantly entered into by many who fought it, ended the parliamentary gridlock.
The rest was a pandemic, if not quite yet history. But the febrile context in which I saw Rosmersholm in 2019 has largely disappeared five years later, with the background noise for An Enemy of the People’s new run at the Duke of York’s Theatre comparable to when Thomas Ostermeier’s interpretation was previously shown at the Barbican in September 2014.
Once again, Britain is ambling to a general election, most likely in October. Where there was apathy about Ed Miliband there is now apathy about Keir Starmer, though this time nobody seriously thinks that Labour can lose, short of the entire shadow cabinet being exposed as double agents for the Kremlin.
Yet perhaps apathy is the natural breeding ground for a play like An Enemy of the People. The story begins in a small town with a precarious economic recovery that rests on the success of a newly-opened health spa that is drawing in eager tourists.
Opinion on this enterprise is cautiously optimistic among the play’s characters. Thomas Stockmann (Matt Smith, of Doctor Who fame) is the chief medical officer for the baths, returned to his hometown and seemingly settled with wife Katharina and their first child. While he’s a bright chap, he has a difficult relationship with authority1 reportedly having had to be bailed out by his brother Peter, the town’s mayor, several times in his past.
That confrontational aspect to his personality is shown when his friends and family discover he has secretly been testing the baths’ water supply for potential contamination. Stockmann is delighted to find his suspicions supported by laboratory testing, the enthusiasm being shared by his rebellious friends until they discover the problem will cost millions to fix, with the baths facing several years of closure and the risk of permanent reputational damage.
This sets Stockmann at loggerheads with the rest of the cast, even his wife being annoyed that he did not inform her of his suspicions sooner. Having lost the support of the local newspaper, Stockmann calls a town meeting, with the second act of the play seeing the floor thrown open to see if the audience agrees with his castigation of the “bloody liberal majority” and their complacent attitude to truth.
‘Liberal’ is probably not the right word here, and might not even suit an American setting as a synonym for the centre left. Who Stockmann is railing against are the kind of politically complacent people who go to political plays of a weekday night in London – conventional and righteous, but not so much they will risk their own comfortable lives to change things.
It’s hard not to read the climate change metaphor strongly into this, though if this was the intention the play was not heavy-handed in hammering it home. The audience on the night I went seemed more taken with questions of scientific transparency – the Covid-19 pandemic perhaps looming larger than potential climate catastrophe.
There was much preaching about ‘following the science’. While allowing that open forums are a tricky place for nuance, there didn’t seem much appreciation of the fact that scientific progress is faltering, always under revision and prone to occasional crises of confidence when somebody spots that huge swathes of studies cannot be replicated.
Hence the admirable chap who suggested the media needed to act as a “gatekeeper” for scientific education, a remark that sunk like a lead zeppelin among the theatre crowd. If anybody was Stockmann’s reflection, it was this man, telling the people next to him that they aren’t cut out to interpret the latest submissions to the The Lancet. They did not like it.
In practice, it’s not a question of whether our information is mediated, but how. Information production has long outpaced any person’s ability to consume it. Everything that reaches us has already been sifted, and we in turn sift what websites to browse, magazines to read, and social networks (real and digital) to spend time in.
If I were a better citizen I’d read the back pages of Private Eye covering inquests, coroner’s reports and the like. Instead I devour the Street of Shame’s amusing, trivial missives on Guardian staff cussing each other out on Twitter, hoping that one day I’ll be notable enough to merit my own reputation-damaging story2.
I’d guess in Ibsen’s eyes that would make me less than ideal as a candidate for high office. To quote Stockmann from an English translation of the original text:
“I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over. But, good Lord! – you can never pretend that it is right that the stupid folk should govern the clever ones!”
Some of this kind of thing, most notably the eugenics stuff, is excised from Ostermeier’s version. But the tenor of the play remains profoundly elitist, advocating for a society run by the hosts of The Rest is Politics, while populist politicians – that is to say, those claiming to act in accordance with public will – are stripped of power. I’d guess, maybe unfairly, that this scheme appealed to the young man in the audience who griped that his forebears had left him a “shit” society to live in.
Whether he feels the same in a decade may well depend on who wins the general election in the next year. And indeed, the staging of An Enemy of the People makes explicit the likelihood that the students of today will one day mimic Stockmann, “the epitome of 30-something reluctant bourgeoisie, struggling to reconcile his political principles with his desire for wealth and stability.”
What starts with a band practice – and Smith’s pleasingly strained rendition of Stand By Me by Oasis – ends with the Stockmann’s looking over their potential inheritance of cheaply-bought shares in the baths company. In this housing market, who could blame them?
No doubt Ostermeier intends to suggest we all make such compromises in the end. But the fact that these shares were bought unbeknownst to Stockmann by his father-in-law also hints at how much of life is tactical expediency. We can barely run our lives, let alone a country, and the best we can hope for is probably various idiots shouting at each other.
Unrelateable content.
And with more than 200 hours of podcasts to trawl through, I can’t be accused of not providing the raw material.