For most people, the draw of An Enemy of the People, Sam Gold and Amy Herzog’s Broadway adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen play, is not so much the chance to see a lesser-known work by the Norwegian dramatist updated for the present so much as the chance to see Jeremy Strong. The ex-Kendall Roy is shedding his suffusive, serious image as Succession’s ex-No 1 boy – or, more accurately, drowning it, as promotional materials show him submerged in a tub – via the stage, in a serious, provocative morality play bound in the decorum of the distant past.
Still, there are flashes of HBO’s political drama du jour in this 19th-century tale of competing agendas. Strong again plays a lone wolf in a tense sibling rivalry on a doomed crusade, albeit with more ethics as Thomas Stockmann, a provincial doctor in a small Norwegian town who discovers dangerous microbes in its water system. He suspects the bacteria, which require advanced (for the time) scientific instruments to detect, are the product of toxic run-off from new industrial tanneries, owned in part by his father-in-law (David Patrick Kelly); the near-certain likelihood of toxic infection – or, even worse, bad PR – imperils the town’s salubrious spas and thus its local economy, both overseen by his brother Peter (an imposing Michael Imperioli), the mayor.
