Post by Grubb.
I saw this poster outside a theater in Oslo.
It’s for Ibsen’s play, “Enemy of the People.” It opens in June at Oslo’s Nye Theater. Nothing unusual about any of that, but I was struck by the play being advertised with a photo of a woman hold a baby. Then I checked the blurb hyping the production:
“Doctor Stockmann discovers that the water in the town of his birth is contaminated and that it is making people sick. In the fight to bring the truth to the table, the doctor realizes that it is not only the water that is poisonous in the small town. When it turns out that the expenses for cleaning the spa must come from the taxpayers’ pockets, the opposition becomes massive.
An enemy of the people is a political thriller, where the basic idea of democracy is put to the test. Because what happens when our intentions to act for the common good collide with our own interests?
In Swedish director Therese Willstedt’s modern staging of En folkefiende , Doctor Stockmann is played by a lactating woman. What does that do to our understanding of the character?
The power struggle also becomes a gender struggle, when Katrine Stockmann is met with prejudice and gossip. Shouldn’t she care more about her role as a mother than as an engaged citizen? And how sane is she really, in the fog of breastfeeding?”
It makes me wish I spoke Norwegian and were rich enough to jet over and catch an afternoon matinee.
“fiende” translates to “enemy”, not really a cognate, but in the general area.