When Dr Stockmann discovers the town's famous spa waters are poisoned, she expects to be treated as a hero for averting an environmental catastrophe. Instead, she's accused by her brother the mayor of threatening the town's livelihood. Public and media opinion divides and the community splits into factions.
Tackling fake news, whistle-blowers and the corruption of power, Rebecca Lenkiewicz's contemporary take on Henrik Ibsen's classic premiered at the Nottingham Playhouse in September 2019.
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Norwegian poet and playwright, was one of the shapers of modern theatre, who tempered naturalism with an understanding of social responsibility and individual psychology. His earliest major plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were large-scale verse dramas, but with Pillars of the Community (1877) he began to explore contemporary issues. There followed A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881) and An Enemy of the People (1882). A richer understanding of the complexity of human impulses marks such later works as The Wild Duck (1885), Rosmersholm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890) and The Master Builder (1892), while the imminence of mortality overshadows his last great plays, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). Rebecca Lenkiewicz's plays include The Night Season (National Theatre, Critics' Circle's Most Promising Playwright Award, 2004) and Her Naked Skin (National Theatre, 2008), which was the first play by a living female playwright to be staged on the Olivier stage. Other plays include The Invisible (The Bush), Jane Wenham, Soho, The Painter (Arcola), The Typist (Riverside Studios), The Lioness (Tricycle), That Almost Unnameable Lust, Shoreditch Madonna, Blue Moon over Poplar (Soho Theatre), A Soldier's Tale (Old Vic), Invisible Mountains (National Theatre), Faeries (Royal Opera House), Justitia (Peacock Theatre), and adaptations of Ibsen's Ghosts (Arcola) and James's The Turn of the Screw (Almeida). Film includes Colette, Disobedience and Ida, co-written with Pawel Pawlikowski, which won a BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, 2015.
