An Enemy of the People

Matt Smith and Jessica Brown Findlay
in "An Enemy of the People"

I was anxious to see Thomas Ostermeier's production of An Enemy of the People for several reasons. For one thing, I've found previous work of his, particularly the Ibsen adaptations, absolutely thrilling. His Hedda Gabler was superb - and I was astonished to discover when I searched this blog for my response that I saw it as long ago as 2008! I still remember very vividly the impassive central performance of Katharina Schüttler (who was also brilliant in Ostermeier's production of Sarah Kane's Blasted), cold as ice and utterly bored - so disillusioned that she seemed never to have known illusion. An Enemy of the People also came to the Barbican, where I'd seen both of those previous shows, in 2014.  I was very sorry to miss it, not least because of the buzz around it from people like Simon McBurney. So when it popped up in the West End a decade later, this time in English with Matt Smith in the lead, I had to book. It was a midweek matinée, and it was ridiculously expensive.

Much of the discourse around the Barbican performances, and other outings for this much-travelled show, centred on the audience debate that happens in the middle of the performance. I was at once keen to experience this and a bit nervous: we are planning an interactive moment of live democracy in our forthcoming Suppliants of Syria. I wanted to see whether Ostermeier's debate worked, and if so how. And I wanted to make sure it wasn't too close to what we're planning: it's never a good idea to lay yourself open to accusations of plagiarism.

I needn't have worried. Disappointingly, the "debate" at the heart of Ostermeier's production isn't really a debate at all. Matt Smith as Dr Stockmann, a star doing a star turn, stands at a lectern after the interval and delivers a very rousing and insightful monologue about the horrors of contemporary capitalism. It's clearly updated as the production ages and grows: for the 2024 West End outing there's a lot about social media, algorithms and online manipulation. Climate change, of course. There's also a lot about grotesque wealth and obscene inequality. It would be pretty difficult to disagree with him. But that is how the production works - Stockmann is quite obviously right, but the bosses and the politicians shut him down anyway. You could, I suppose, say that's also how our world works - but I don't think it's how Ibsen works, and I also don't think it's how theatre works more generally. In Ibsen's original text, there's a lot more nuance: Stockmann's brother Peter does actually have some cogent arguments about social cohesion and the threat to the local economy, all of which become melodramatically transformed into incoherent malice and selfishness in Ostermeier's version. There is a hero and there is a villain.

If we all know who's right and who's wrong, then of course it becomes a bit of a challenge to hold a debate. But the production doesn't really hold a debate at all. Instead Priyanga Burford, the actor "in the chair", asks who agrees with Dr. Stockmann and why. So we get a series of interventions expressing personal experiences or ideas which support the general (by now well-established) point that capitalism sucks. I don't disagree, of course - but it isn't a debate and it isn't dramatic. In fact, it feels closer to an evangelical testimonial session or a right-wing rally than to a democratic forum. And, I'm afraid, it's also blindingly hypocritical. 

So I put my hand up. I get the mic. I agree with what Dr Stockmann had said: of course I do. I agree that theatre should open up and expose our social and political structures. And then I ask, if this production is so deeply opposed to capitalism, why is it so expensive just to be in the room?  

Thunderous applause. Cheers. Laughter. An explosion of joy and anger combined. People all around patting me on the back.

Priyanga Burford tries to deflect it by returning to the fiction. "Oh!" she says, "did you have to pay to come in? We'll have to look into that."  Too right we will.

Egor Bulychev & the Others

Andy Burse as Egor Bulychev.  All photos by Robert Workman.

In Tuesday's Guardian, Mark Lawson writes about a perceived trend towards "German-style" re-imaginings of "modern classics", citing the National Theatre's new production conflating three plays by D.H. Lawrence, and Chichester's Young Chekhov Trilogy.  I suspect he would have been deeply shocked, although hopefully also stimulated, to see what we got up to with Gorky's late play Egor Bulychev and the Others at Rose Bruford last week.

I'm more than happy to admit the Teutonic influence.  After all, Bruford calls itself "London's international drama school", I'm a Visiting Professor and I run an intercultural theatre company - it would seem logical enough that we should look beyond the British approach to naturalism.  Thomas Ostermeier's re-workings of Ibsen were very much in my mind as I started to think through Gorky's text   - he deliberately creates a hyper-real contemporary world in which to locate these pieces, recovering the social and political radicalism that made them so controversial in the first place.  I was also thinking about Simon Stone's version of The Wild Duck for Belvoir (recently filmed as The Daughter), which, although its approach is psychological rather than social and political, is a lesson in how form can be altered as a way of giving a piece the feel of contemporary narrative.  However, I suspect that even these productions, and certainly the ones cited by Lawson, are much closer than our Gorky was to what the writer had expected to see on stage.  It is one thing to modernise a play, either through a change of context or through a structural shift.  It is quite another to do both, in a deliberate attempt to turn the original inside out.  We deliberately renounced what Lawson called "absolute fidelity to what a playwright's intentions are perceived to be."

Austin Caley as Stefan, Katie Trump as Varya

Or maybe not entirely…  That "perceived to be" is a very interesting phrase.  Perceived by whom?  Intentions, after all, are very slippery things.  People lie about their intentions - even to themselves.  As Nesta Jones said at our post-show discussion, sometimes a play can be found to contain a "secret play" that subverts and attacks the apparent meaning.  Sometimes that is the play that has to be produced, especially when, as 21st century people in dialogue with a classic, we find that there are aspects of "what a playwright's intentions are perceived to be" with which we find ourselves in profound disagreement.  Some of my student cast had just emerged from working on The Merchant of Venice: you cannot simply buy into that text, knowing what we now know.  No more, I think, can we buy into the apparent meaning of late Gorky - plays written after his return to Stalin's Russia…  My first night card from Michael Earley was a painting of Stalin sitting at Gorky's deathbed.  I do not want Stalin there at my side when I croak.

Gloria Obianyo as Nkolika, Andro Crespo as Pedro, Celeste Collier as Georgie

Naturalism has been sanitised.  It has been forgotten that, originally, naturalism was the avant-garde.  We have come to think of “realistic” performance as a default position.  We have diluted it into family drama and soap opera, psychological thriller and “reality” TV.  In this process, we have lost touch with the radical origins of the form.  The English tradition of naturalistic performance eschews the socio-political dimension in favour of psychological “character study”.  We dramatise Freud.  But Freud’s ideas are diametrically opposed to those of Zola, Ibsen and Gorky.  For Freud, if you are (say) depressed, then that is your own fault – it’s to do with some internal problem in your personal make-up.  Psychoanalytical performance denies our relationship to others – the social, political and spiritual links that underpin our lives.  Maybe your depression is actually to do with living in a massively unequal society that saddles its youth with enormous debts; with the failure of mainstream culture to engage with the complexity of modern Britain; with God having absented himself from our dialogue with our own mortality.  In the 21st century, we have to revisit naturalism in a way that reinvigorates this more radical agenda.

Gloria Obianyo as Nkolika

In an age dominated by filmic narratives, the structures of naturalism are a barrier, not an aid, to contacting what is realistic in Gorky.  Because he is bound into a three-act, single set structure, he has to put himself through incredible contortions to engineer people into Egor Bulychev’s dining room at appropriate moments to encounter one another.  Take that cumbersome scaffolding away, and a series of short, punchy scenes is revealed.  Re-order those scenes, and the play begins to reveal its extraordinary modernity.  So we found ourselves re-imagining Egor as a Russian oligarch running an investment management company in London, with a family of calculating super-rich eager to pounce on his wealth when cancer finally overcomes him in the Wellington Hospital.  The loyal maid Glasha became his PA and lover Georgie; and his sister-in-law's convent was re-located to Nigeria, where it was attacked by Boko Haram.  The deserting soldiers who roam across Russia in Gorky's text, striking fear into Egor's family, became the refugees fleeing into Europe - and the gamekeeper who supports them became the family chauffeur.  Cars make great locations for claustrophobic scenes of intense argument.

Kizzy Dunn as Shura

Above all, I felt that we had to move Egor's illegitimate daughter Shura to the centre of the play.  Gorky indicates that she somehow moves towards the Russian Revolution of 1917 - but her process of conversion all happens offstage and becomes difficult to understand or identify with.  By shifting some of the scenes from the first Act to a new position near the end of the play, we were able to show her being used and abused by the self-interested money-grabbers around Egor's death bed, and so made sense of her radicalisation.  The revolutionary character Pablo (Yakov in the original) only appeared towards the end, as the London society we had created tipped over into the British Revolution of 2017. At the same point, naturalism gave way to a more dream-like style: was this revolution real, or was it Egor's dying dream?  Was the stylistic shift in itself perhaps a symptom of leaving behind a culture that has been proved decadent and wanting?

Final scene - The Revolution

I love doing drama school productions.  It's where the future is made.

Learning from Students

Attempts on her Life opens this week, and I'm making use of the lull before we start to plot lighting to catch up a bit on the blog. It's been an extraordinary process, and immensely valuable for me in developing my devised work. Because Martin Crimp's script is so open, so ambiguous, so freeing for the performers and the director, the process has been very similar to that of devising. Except that the language is rich and disciplined, in ways which text derived from improvisation tends not to be. It's set me thinking about ways of integrating pre-exisiting text into the devising process, or of using a writer in a devising process, without that person acquiring the dreaded authorial authority.

The students have also taught me a huge amount about what it means to be alive right now. It's great to do a play about the present moment with young people - they've grown up with the internet, with media dominance, with the war on terror. The other day we talked about 9/11 - it turned out that one of them celebrated his 15th birthday that day. So what to me seems strange and new, is to them familiar and ordinary.

Seeing the world through such eyes, I went to Thomas Ostermeier's production of Hedda Gabler at the Barbican last week. Fantastic to see an Ibsen production which wasn't bogged down in period detail and Norwegian depression. Ostermeier drags the story into a cold and sharp contemporary reality, with the result that the play becomes extremely funny, like one of Calixto's blood and sperm productions. The reviews have been complaining that it isn't "moving". I'd have thought that was exactly the point.