02 October 2014, The Tablet

Disruptive power


An Enemy of the People, Barbican Theatre, London; Teh Internet is Serious Business, Royal Court Theatre, London

 
Sometimes THEATRICAL schedules bring happy accidental overlaps and, opening on consecutive nights last week, were plays, written 132 years apart, that both dramatise whistle-blowing and activism.The echoes were even more noticeable because the senior piece, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), looked much younger after having been fast-forwarded, in this Schaubühne Berlin production by Thomas Ostermeier, to contemporary Europe, with mobile phones and computer screens, although, as is often the case with updatings, the time shift was not entirely consistent.While the mineral baths at which the protagonist, Dr Thomas Stockmann, is the medical officer have plausibly become a health spa, the medic is still nervously waiting, as the play begins, for the postman to bring the
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