Enemy of the people

Freely inspired by the play by Henrik Ibsen from 1882, the adaptation by Carole Lorang and Stéphane Olivier makes the main character a woman. From the original play, they keep the combative trajectory of the Docteure Stockmann – who fights for the interests of the citizens of the city who face economic difficulties and a water scandal. An engaged woman, she thinks she is working for the common good and confronts her brother, a politician, whose personal and economic interests take precedence. Courageously resisting all attempts at manipulation, she is soon declared Ennemie du peuple. Disappointed by her fellow citizens, her bitterness only grows. The staging of Carole Lorang brushes, with great subtlety, a character whose scientific ethics and implacable morality will nevertheless not be able to prevent her authoritarian drifts. La Docteure Stockmann is irreproachable, but her humanity dries up before our eyes, her wounded ego swells, she isolates herself and is no longer carried by anything but an irrepressible need for vengeance and destruction. It is a cornellian choice that this new reading of Ibsen's masterpiece proposes to us: should we favor a radicalism that can lead to our loss or prefer democratic compromise? In this dilemma, everyone tries to impose their truth, until the breaking point. Carole Lorang moves away from bourgeois drama to highlight a burning political question: that of the difficulty of carrying one's humanist ideals high, without losing tenderness towards one's neighbor, however distant from us they may be.