Enemy of the People

As Strindberg is the forebear of O'Neill, Ibsen is the inspiration of Arthur Miller. Convinced that "a new production of the play on the tradition basis would truly bury Ibsen for good" Miller has made an adaptation of Enemy of the People that strips away much of the pedanty and Victorianism of the play. Yet the injection of the Miller touch and the attempt to up-date the speech and action undercuts some of the play's force and argumentative strength.

The production at the Little Opera House, on a two-week furlough from off-Broadway, is powerfully effected. The full plight of a doctor who discovers the town's health baths to be polluted, is relentlessly revealed in successive episodes from the time his brother, the mayor, first suggests that he is a "traitor to society." At the end of the second act a tremendous and truly exciting feeling of futility engulfs the viewer as the doctor attempts to explain the danger and his own remedial plan to a mass meeting where his audience is stacked against him. Agitators, who sit among the theatre audience, usurp control of the doctor's meeting. Fearing new taxes and loss of the town's chief income, they vote the doctor an "enemy of the people."

The audience realizes from the first the inevitable outcome of the action, if not from the title itself, then from the basis of the doctor's optimism--the liberal press and the "middle-class majority." Hovstad as the curly-haired 20th century editor is at his best when his true yellow colors are flying; his bourgeois publisher, superbly acted by Al Sperduto, epitomizes the egoistic middle-class man of moderation. The result of the audience's foreknowledge of failure is a tremendous irony that fills the play and nearly offsets its didacticism.

Miller's adaption is admirable but not wholly successful. There often remains a curious juxtaposition of colloquial speech and elevated pronouncement, as when the doctor tells the mayor, "Don't jump on me with that," and then adds, "The trouble with you is that your impressions are blunted."

Earl Montgomery, as Doctor Stockmann, has much of the bearing of a "matinee idol," and appears much younger than his wife, admirably portrayed by Lois Holmes. Art Smith, as Morton Kiil, presents a striking portrait of her shrewd and disreputable father. Gene Frankel's direction is adept and certain touches are superb. Yet with the children, who add more distraction than depth, his direction is spotty and they generally dash onstage with a gust, then settle into the shadows to await their lines.

In Enemy of the People, Ibsen wrote a masterpiece of crowd study which Miller has reworked with his own intimate knowledge of structure and stagecraft. The "terrible wrath of Henrik Ibsen" makes powerful theatre fare.