Ein Volksfeind (An Enemy of the People)

Director Stefan Pucher avoids the risk of a half-hearted update of this piece by performing a radical adaptation. Dietmar Dath’s version is more than congenial; he precisely renders the newspeak of today’s media-democracy without betraying Ibsen or the underlying story. Dath transfers Spa doctor Dr Tomas Stockmann’s home to a small town with the “most progressive local authorities ever”. Initially, Tomas, played by Markus Scheumann, mistakes the shiny happy people around him for upright pillars of society. He is aware that his brother, the mayor, is a grey eminence, but other than that he prefers to believe in the good in people. Meanwhile, Robert Hunger-Bühler, aka Peter Stockmann, knows how to turn the tricks of open government to his advantage. He knows which information to whisper into whose smart phone and when it pays to intervene personally in the newsroom of a key medium: This master of local politics has the art of timing down to a T. Stockmann vs. Stockmann – that is what the final conflict boils down to, staged as a double-dealing talk-show spectacle which gives the audience a choice: They can either get on the bandwagon of Billing’s suggestive questions in the foyer, or keep faith with the indomitable Tomas Stockmann in the auditorium, who has yet to face the shitstorm which his town has in store for him.

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