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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

A Trial: After An Enemy of the People review – Wagner Moura upends Ibsen and keeps us guessing

Actor Wagner Moura stands with arms crossed before a screen reading
Original … Wagner Moura in A Trial: After An Enemy of the People. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

This dramatised trial takes Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play about a man’s campaign to expose the secret scandal of contaminated water in his town and turns it into a modern day interrogation: of speaking out versus remaining silent, of a family at war and of fiction and reality itself.

In fact, is this a drama at all? It starts off as such but minutes later, the celebrated Brazilian screen actor Wagner Moura, playing Ibsen’s Thomas Stockmann, seemingly breaks character to talk to us directly. Stockmann still sits invisibly on stage and we as an audience are here to judge him, he says, before returning to inhabit him.

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