Three times "Enemy of the People" premieres: An angry citizen in three cities

It is no longer so easy to keep track of who is being pilloried and when and for what reason.

In this country, censorship usually no longer occurs in the form of state sanctions for the good of “good morals”, but in the wake of angry surfers and canceling Twitter teams who want to ban a film, a panelist or a controversial scientific thesis from public perception – and thus usually achieve the opposite.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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It's no longer about the ugly fight between political opponents, it's about moral cleanliness in advance.

And that's what Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People," written in 1882, is about.

The spa doctor Tomas Stockmann discovers that the water in his homeland is poisoned by industrial drains.

But since the impoverished small town is in the process of becoming a prosperous health resort, his ecological discovery has political and – because his brother is the mayor – also family consequences.

If the local paper is initially interested in free opinion out of a craving for attention, the support soon dwindles in the face of the drastic economic consequences of this expression of opinion.

Stockmann is declared an enemy of the people, whose apartment is evicted and who is excluded from public discussions.

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one has dedicated oneself entirely to the critique of capitalism.

The staging by British director Lily Sykes takes the economically liberal narrative of the lack of alternatives as a hook.

The spa, in which the truth has no place, is fully economized.

The imminent completion of the bathing area has triggered a boom that is based on speculation in the sense of the "New Economy".

Land prices have risen, foreign investment is soaring, and the city, led by the matronly libertarian Petra Stockmann (Caroline Dietrich) as mayor, is emerging from unemployment and lethargy.

Therefore, the taxes for the rich should also be lowered.

Like a mantra, she repeats, appearing in a fur coat and neat dress as an Ayn Rand-esque oligarch,

The stage design by Thea Hoffmann-Axthelm, in which meter-high palm trees line up next to pools and facades decorated with marble, is intended to indicate how rich the city has become.

Everyone is "happy", as the local newspaper says.

The dark secret of the polluted wells that endanger this prosperity looms over everything like a sword of Damocles.

But the power triangle of politics, media and lobbyists is still stable, as is the basic economic policy orientation towards Thatcherism.

The charismatic printer Aslaksen, played by Stefan Graf, is also the president of the landowners' association.

Hovstadt (Oscar Olivo), the editor-in-chief of the "Volksbote", makes a pact with him.

He is the poorest sausage in the bunch, because his newspaper is about to be closed due to falling circulation.

Schauspiel Frankfurt relies entirely on a trivial critique of the free market.

The socio-political theme of the play thus disappears into the background, which is also due to the fact that the enemy of the people Thomas Stockmann – portrayed with little relish by Isaak Dentler – is rather a weak character in Sykes' production.

Almost schizophrenic, he first plays a moral do-gooder who wants to save the city from the stranglehold of the Manchester capitalists, then a know-it-all scientist who considers himself superhuman, and suddenly an angry citizen who dreams of destroying the elites "once and for all eliminate and render harmless".