Old clichés, one might think. Who would a social drama from 1882 pull away from their flatscreen? Well then, let’s take a look...

“An Enemy of the People” by Henrik Ibsen was published in 1882. The Norwegian writer himself was labelled an “enemy of the people” after his play “Ghosts” addressed several taboos, such as incest and euthanasia.

“An Enemy of the People” deals with the “pitfalls” of democracy: power games, profit-seeking, and the loss of the ability to listen to one another and find compromise. In Weimar, director Hermann Schmidt-Rahmen brings Ibsen’s material into the present and simultaneously turns the plot “on its head”. Not deadly serious, but often highly comedic, a political and ecological drama unfolds on the stage of the Deutsches Nationaltheater (DNT) about an emerging tourist destination built around a pit that was filled with industrial waste decades ago.

Tensions escalate between the town’s mayor and her perpetually overlooked brother, a spa doctor. He wants to expose a scandal and thereby shakes the supposedly intact world. More and more characters become involved, each pursuing their own agenda, including on social media. Until no reasonable discussion is possible anymore, facts become irrelevant, and a torchlight procession begins.