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Henrik Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People using uncharacteristic methods. Usually, his plays evolved from a months-long series of outlines, drafts and revisions, but this play emerged as a single version written over a few weeks in the spring of 1882. On June 21st, he wrote to his editor, “I am still a little uncertain whether to call it a comedy or simply a play; it has much of the character of a comedy, but there is also a serious basic theme.” This “serious theme” helps to explain the speed with which Ibsen wrote the play. Under violent attack from conservative critics for his play Ghosts, Ibsen quickly struck back against those who would suppress free and honest thought. Surprisingly, though, he saved his harshest words for those supposed free-thinkers who bowed to majority opinion. “What is one to say of the attitude taken by the so-called liberal press?” he wrote to his friend Georg Brandes just before beginning work on the play. “These leaders who talk and write of freedom and progress, and at the same time allow themselves to be the slaves of the supposed opinions of their subscribers?”
Critical and popular reaction to An Enemy of the People was mixed, though nowhere near as violent as it had been to Ghosts the previous year. Henrik Jaeger, a long-time opponent of Ibsen’s work, called it “personally the most likeable, psychologically the most interesting, and aesthetically the weakest of Ibsen’s plays.” Similarly, the Danish critic Edvard Brandes called the play “a mere dramatized newspaper article written in answer to some poor scribblings which weren’t worth half a penny of gunpowder, let alone a literary reply from a great author.” Another Dane, Erik Bøgh, praised the play’s artistry rather than its politics, appreciating Ibsen’s use of “everyday circumstances with everyday people speaking everyday prose … presenting his hero without any pretense at an idealized personality.”
In the years since its premiere, however, An Enemy of the People has more often been staged for its politics than its artistry. In 1905, on the eve of the first Russian revolution, the great actor and director Konstantin Stanislavsky’s performance as Stockmann was interrupted by an emotional crowd eager to congratulate him for his “revolutionary” speeches. And in 1950, the American playwright Arthur Miller adapted the play as a broadside against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on “un-American activities.” Miller’s version was filmed in 1978 as a serious vehicle for action star Steve McQueen, but it wasn’t released until after McQueen’s death.
The part of Dr. Stockmann also has appealed to actors looking for dynamic leading roles. The famous British actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an early exponent of the part, playing Stockmann frequently from 1893 on. Walter Hampden, an American actor, also played the part throughout the 1920s and 1930s. An Enemy of the People was last seen on Broadway in 1971, with a production starring Stephen Elliott and Philip Bosco.