Un ennemi du peuple

All is well at the start of the play. Peter Stockmann, the prefect, oversees the running of the local health baths, an important source of income for the town. His brother Thomas, the medical officer of the baths, is responsible for ensuring its medicinal qualities to visitors. They are in agreement on most things, or at least, so it seems. Deep down, however, they are diametrically opposed to each other. A spark is all it takes for their rivalry to rear its head, a factor which is made all too obvious when Thomas discovers that the water in the baths is contaminated... As the brotherly conflict spreads to the rest of the town, Ibsen complicates matters further by “treading a fine line between tragedy and comedy”. Perfect material, then, for Jean-François Sivadier’s playful brand of theatricality, and his indefatigable search for an actor-audience relationship firmly rooted “in the present”. In demanding the truth to be told, the whistle-blower risks, in societal terms, everything he has. But who is going to be believe him? How can we reconcile the demands for justice to be done with the dictates of the economy? For Sivadier  (this is his first Ibsen production, in a new translation by Eloi Recoing), the two brothers, arch enemies from now on, are, perhaps no more than the double figure of a single entity: the “human ambiguity” of the problem that Ibsen brings to light never fades into a “humanist” harmony. And it could be said that nothing unites communities better than a shared lie, at the expense of a scapegoat...