An Enemy of the People
Sep. 10th, 2006 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
orangerfulYesterday was a FULL day. We had our lunch/play/dinner date with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jimithingy's family. This time at the Shakespeare Theatre we saw Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People". I had never read or seen anything by Ibsen before, so it was a new experience all around. The play was very well done but very intense. It had comedic moments, but it's really a bit of a tragedy. Highly quotable bits about politics though. Ibsen was apparently a teensy bit anti-democracy (or at least, the democracy that had taken over his homeland) and there's lots of lines about the problems with the concept of democracy, politics etc.
The play was actually written as a reaction to the censorship that Ibsen endured when he wrote both 'A Doll's House' and then 'Ghosts'. 'Doll's House' apparently ends the play with the wife leaving the husband because she's had enough, which upset one group. So he wrote 'Ghosts', where the wife stays with her husband and is miserable, and that set off other people, enough so that it was not performed in Norway for 10 years! Ibsen was so ticked, that he sat down and wrote 'Enemy' as a reaction.
In 'Enemy' the town doctor discovers that the local baths, recently built to help bring tourists to the dying town, are actually filling up with sewage. The doctor merely wants to tell the Truth, and fix the problem. But while his intentions are noble and pure, he quickly gets sucked into the politics between the "liberal" newspaper, the mayor, the "small business men", the homeowners association and everyone else in the town. So, we pretty much watch his go from naive to understanding far too much about how politicians think.
I'm going to check out a book of his plays and read 'Doll's House' and 'Ghosts' just to see exactly how he was saying things, and then write down some of the more jucier quotes from 'Enemy'.
"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."
" . . . the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
"Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."
jimithingy's family. This time at the Shakespeare Theatre we saw Henrik Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People". I had never read or seen anything by Ibsen before, so it was a new experience all around. The play was very well done but very intense. It had comedic moments, but it's really a bit of a tragedy. Highly quotable bits about politics though. Ibsen was apparently a teensy bit anti-democracy (or at least, the democracy that had taken over his homeland) and there's lots of lines about the problems with the concept of democracy, politics etc. The play was actually written as a reaction to the censorship that Ibsen endured when he wrote both 'A Doll's House' and then 'Ghosts'. 'Doll's House' apparently ends the play with the wife leaving the husband because she's had enough, which upset one group. So he wrote 'Ghosts', where the wife stays with her husband and is miserable, and that set off other people, enough so that it was not performed in Norway for 10 years! Ibsen was so ticked, that he sat down and wrote 'Enemy' as a reaction.
In 'Enemy' the town doctor discovers that the local baths, recently built to help bring tourists to the dying town, are actually filling up with sewage. The doctor merely wants to tell the Truth, and fix the problem. But while his intentions are noble and pure, he quickly gets sucked into the politics between the "liberal" newspaper, the mayor, the "small business men", the homeowners association and everyone else in the town. So, we pretty much watch his go from naive to understanding far too much about how politicians think.
I'm going to check out a book of his plays and read 'Doll's House' and 'Ghosts' just to see exactly how he was saying things, and then write down some of the more jucier quotes from 'Enemy'.
"The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority."
" . . . the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."
"Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."