If your company was poisoning its client base, would you speak out? Or would you keep your mouth shut to keep getting paid?
In An Enemy of the People, a work by 19th century realist Henrik Ibsen, this is the scenario that has befallen his hero, Dr Stockman. In Melissa Reeves’ pointedly 2018 take on the story, Stockman is no longer a man on a solo crusade against the closed ranks of a community looking the other way. Instead, Reeves asks: what happens when the only person who cares about the truth is a woman?
Did you guess gaslighting, steamrolling and silence? You win a big and very depressing prize for being aware of how the world continues to work!
Here, Stockman is played by Kate Mulvany. She’s a doctor who has returned to her hometown after the death of her husband to be chief wellness consultant of a new and ritzy health spa. It’s been good for her and her emotional health, but it’s also been great for the town – the spa has brought in jobs, the local economy is up, and there isn’t a single boarded-up shop on the main drag anymore.
But when she discovers the water is contaminated with heavy metals, Stockman knows she needs to pull the plug – but no one else, except for her daughter Petra (Nikita Waldron, bright and earnest here as a feminist vlogger), seems to agree.
Her brother (an appropriately slimy Leon Ford), the town’s mayor and a significant investor in the spa, doesn’t want to lose out on money. And the editor of the local newspaper (Steve Le Marquand, easygoing like a fox) is easily bought with an offer of a spot on the local council. Petra’s boyfriend Billing (Charles Wu as the ultimate ‘nice guy’), a journalist at the paper, is easily swept up in the quest to silence Stockman, and so too is Aslaksen (Kenneth Moraleda, giving smiling conservatism), the president of the Small Business Owners Association. And don’t even think about Stockman’s father in law (the always delightful Peter Carroll) as an ally; it’s his business that poisoned the water in the first place.
Soon, Stockman and Petra are fighting the good fight against a sea of men with influence and power, who find plenty of ways to abuse it, from the political to the personal (there’s an incident of sexual harassment that’s shockingly familiar in its escalation).
The tenor of the first act is a problem: the play’s takedown of the middle class is not quickly established or bought into, which may be a collective miscommunication; on opening night the audience was quick to laugh at lines that may have been intended to carry more weight (or might have been more effective if they had). And the production, directed by Anne-Louise Sarks, has trouble finding its collective tone. The establishing of relationships and plots seems to overshadow the urgency of Stockman’s discovery – it feels, for the duration of the first act, like it’s three steps behind the blazingly righteous, slightly vainglorious, utterly watchable Mulvany. You can’t help but wish everyone else would catch up to her and her momentum.
But in the opening of the second act, the play does distill one of its driving messages with throat-clenching specificity: it’s a point by point demonstration into the myriad ways women are silenced by men in power. In a town hall scene that uses the full range of the Belvoir Upstairs theatre, encouraging, as this play historically does, light audience interaction, Mulvany is talked over, suppressed, misquoted and framed as hysterical. It’s so accurate it’s devastating.
Later, largely through the character of Randine (Catherine Davies, excellent here), Stockman’s cleaner and the play’s representative of the working class, Reeves examines how the capitalist patriarchy that has seemed so untenable for Stockman and Petra is much worse for those in the working classes – what is shocking and heartbreaking, for people who are non-white and disadvantaged in Australia’s class system, becomes unliveable. Unwinnable. Randine is an important counterpoint for Stockman and Petra; she’s an essential, conflicting part of their support network.
Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in no small part because he was a pissed off artist who’d gotten some bad reviews. His preceding play, Ghosts (which was staged at Belvoir last year in all its pearl-clutching, syphilis-incest glory) had the community of its time up in arms: it was too salacious, too unsavoury. Too real. So Ibsen whipped up this dramedy about a man standing for what’s real (contaminated water but also, secretly, the right to talk about STIs on Norway’s stages).
In the hands of Reeves and Sarks, who directs the second act with clean, clarifying ferocity, this protest as self-interest becomes something else entirely: a demonstration of women learning from and drawing strength from each other, and a suggestion that Ibsen’s point – that a man standing alone in his truth is the most noble thing – might need an update.
Maybe, this production says, the collective is more important than the individual. Sure, Stockman’s head is still turned by press and attention, and her motivations are as complex as any human, but there’s something new here, something that feels like our modern struggle: that you can’t fix a community without talking to the women, the workers, the people silenced by racism, nationalism, or elitism. It’s time, this Enemy of the People says, to look beyond ourselves and look toward others instead.