Matt Smith’s rebel with a cause has a slow-burn intensity in this reimagined rock’n’roll adaptation of Ibsen’s 1882 drama. He is a doctor, new dad and musician who belts out a David Bowie number before launching his protest against small-town corporate corruption and the sale of contaminated spa water for public consumption.
Smith recently launched an offstage protest himself against the use of trigger warnings, though some might prefer to be alerted to the audience participation in Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer’s adaptation. This comes in a radical swivel when Thomas Stockmann (Smith) delivers his speech about the rotten core of society; the auditorium turns into a Question Time-style symposium and we become Ibsen’s townsfolk.
Conceived and directed by Ostermeier, the production has long been in repertoire in Berlin and had a brief run at the Barbican, in German, a decade ago. So it should be a well-oiled machine in this English version by Duncan Macmillan but feels strangely subdued and halting in the first, less compelling act.
Stockmann is a firebrand in turn-up jeans opposite his town major brother, Peter (Paul Hilton), sour and self-righteous in a suit. His wife, Katharina (Jessica Brown Findlay), is a schoolteacher (rather than his teacher daughter, Petra, of the original script). They are new parents in the present day yet the milieu, with guitars, singalongs and the couple’s fellow band members who wander across the Stockmanns’ home, give it the sense of a 1960s commune.
Bowie’s Changes is reprised too many times, ramming home the idea that change in this town is blocked, and segueing to debates on how it can be best implemented – “in small steps” advocates newspaper publisher Aslaksen (Priyanga Burford) as opposed to Stockmann’s revolution.
Jan Pappelbaum’s stage design has enigmatic graffiti scrawled on walls, with phrases such as “If you run into the Buddha on the street kill him.” It all looks and sounds effortfully cool. Ibsen spoke of the comic elements in this play and these have been accentuated here, with mixed results, especially through the newspaper office scenes featuring Aslaksen, gawky subeditor Billing (Zachary Hart) and the idealist turned coward Hovstad (Shubham Saraf).
A change of tone and tempo comes in the second act, when the audience is invited – even forced – to get involved. It brings intensity, showcases Ibsen’s timelessness and also adapts the play’s moral arguments excellently for our times. There is an instruction to “turn up the house lights” and, as Smith stays in character, it is us who bring real life to the drama with audience comments on such issues as first-past-the-post electoral systems, recession and governmental obfuscation.
Smith turns from rebel to self-appointed guru and shows how the truth-teller can himself become corrupted. His tirade on everything from the postmaster scandal to food banks swings between talking truth to power and loony conspiracy. Hilton is excellent as the establishment brother and their sibling tensions are well caught: they regress into angry little boys when they fight.
Not all of it works: Katharina is a cypher whose illicit kiss with a character goes nowhere. Stockmann’s father-in-law, Morten Kiil (Nigel Lindsay), pops in with his dog – a gorgeously obedient Alsatian – although it is puzzling why the animal is there, beyond entertainment value, and Kiil is flatly drawn. But there is more brilliance here to outweigh these elements, not least an ending which is more equivocal and unsettling than Ibsen’s.
At the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 6 April
