(no subject)
Last night I went to see "An Enemy of the People" at the Shakespeare Theatre with a friend from work. It is an awesome play, and I would definitely say that anybody with an interest in theatre or politics should come out and see it. Ibsen was disillusioned with both sides of the political spectrum, and he used this play to bring both conservatives and liberals to task. Whether it is the conservatives like mayor Peter Stockmann and "the Badger" Morten Kiil who can't imagine changing their ways and take every attempt at improvement as a slap in the face, or else the liberals like Horvstad and Billing who follow the "solid majority" like sheep and only support positive change when it advances their own interests, Ibsen and the character of Dr. Stockmann who represents him are obviously disgusted with them all. This play was apparently written in response to the critical attacks on his earlier play Ghosts, which inflamed conservatives with its attacks on Victorian morals, and also another play that he wrote that liberals took as an attack on them. Ultimately the protagonists of this play, Dr. Stockmann and the staunchly apolitical sea captain Horster, are the ones who eschew party politics and instead choose the path of common sense and truth. As Ibsen puts it at the end of the play, "the strongest man is the one who stands most alone." I think that this play is very timely given the current nature of things, with the atmosphere of dogmatism coming from both sides of the political aisle in the past couple of decades. The "you're either for us or against us" mentality that pervades party politics in this country would be right at home in this small, Victorian-era Norwegian town, and the ostracism of this play's protagonist in the middle of the 19th century can just as easily be seen taking place at the beginning of the 21st.