As it has turned out, this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition. Having seen it in five or six countries, and directed it in China and Sweden, neither of whose languages I know, it was both mystifying and gratifying to note that people everywhere react pretty much the same in the same places of the play. When I arrived in China to begin rehearsals the people in the American embassy, with two exceptions, were sure the Chinese were too culturally remote from the play to ever understand it. The American ambassador and the political officer thought otherwise, the first because he had been born and raised in China, and the second, I supposed, because it was his job to understand how Chinese thought about life. And what they were thinking turned out to be more or less what they were thinking in New York or London or Paris, namely that being human—a father, mother, son—is something most of us fail at most of the time, and a little mercy is eminently in order given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when in fact they are all trembling in a fast wind blowing mindlessly around the earth.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Preface to Adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People
1951
1
At the outset it ought to be said that the word “adaptation” is very distasteful to me. It seems to mean that one writer has ventured into another’s chickencoop, or worse, into the sacred chamber of another’s personal creations and rearranged things without permission. Most of the time an adaptation is a playwright’s excuse for not writing his own plays, and since I am not yet with my back against that particular wall, I think it wise to set down what I have tried to do with An Enemy of the People, and why I did it.
There is one quality in Ibsen that no serious writer can afford to overlook. It lies at the very center of his force, and I found in it—as I hope others will—a profound source of strength. It is his insistence, his utter conviction, that he is going to say what he has to say, and that the audience, by God, is going to listen. It is the very same quality that makes a star actor, a great public speaker, and a lunatic. Every Ibsen play begins with the unwritten words: “Now listen here!” And these words have shown me a path through the wall of “entertainment,” a path that leads beyond the formulas and dried-up precepts, the pretense and fraud, of the business of the stage. Whatever else Ibsen has to teach, this is his first and greatest contribution.
In recent years Ibsen has fallen into a kind of respectful obscurity that is not only undeserved but really quite disrespectful of culture—and a disservice to the theater besides. I decided to work on An Enemy of the People because I had a private wish to demonstrate that Ibsen is really pertinent today, that he is not “old-fashioned,” and, implicitly, that those who condemn him are themselves misleading our theater and our playwrights into a blind alley of senseless sensibility, triviality, and the inevitable waste of our dramatic talents; for it has become the fashion for plays to reduce the “thickness” of life to a fragile facsimile, to avoid portraying the complexities of life, the contradictions of character, the fascinating interplay of cause and effect that have long been part of the novel. And I wished also to buttress the idea that the dramatic writer has, and must again demonstrate, the right to entertain with his brains as well as his heart. It is necessary that the public understand again that the stage is the place for ideas, for philosophies, for the most intense discussion of man’s fate. One of the masters of such a discussion is Henrik Ibsen, and I have presumed to point this out once again.
2
I have attempted to make An Enemy of the People as alive to Americans as it undoubtedly was to Norwegians, while keeping it intact. I had no interest in exhuming anything, in asking people to sit respectfully before the work of a celebrated but neglected writer. There are museums for such activities; the theater has no truck with them, and ought not to have.
And I believed this play could be alive for us because its central theme is, in my opinion, the central theme of our social life today. Simply, it is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis. More personally, it is the question of whether one’s vision of the truth ought to be a source of guilt at a time when the mass of men condemn it as a dangerous and devilish lie. It is an enduring theme—in fact, possibly the most enduring of all Ibsen’s themes—because there never was, nor will there ever be, an organized society able to countenance calmly the individual who insists that he is right while the vast majority is absolutely wrong.
The play is the story of a scientist who discovers an evil and, innocently believing that he has done a service to humanity, expects that he will at least be thanked. However, the town has a vested interest in the perpetuation of that evil, and his “truth,” when confronted with that interest, must be made to conform. The scientist cannot change the truth for any reason disconnected with the evil. He clings to the truth and suffers the social consequences. At rock bottom, then, the play is concerned with the inviolability of objective truth. Or, put more dynamically, that those who attempt to warp the truth for ulterior purposes must inevitably become warped and corrupted themselves. This theme is valid today, just as it will always be, but some of the examples given by Ibsen to prove it may no longer be.
I am told that Ibsen wrote this play as a result of his being practically stoned off the stage for daring to present Ghosts. The plot is supposed to have come from a news item which told of a Hungarian scientist who had discovered poisoned water in the town’s water supply and had been pilloried for his discovery. If this was the case, my interpretation of the theme is doubly justified, for it then seems beyond doubt that Ibsen meant above and beyond all else to defend his right to stand “at the outpost of society,” alone with the truth, and to speak from there to his fellow men.
However, there are a few speeches, and one scene in particular, which have been taken to mean that Ibsen was a fascist. In the original meeting scene in which Dr. Stockmann sets forth his—and Ibsen’s—point of view most completely and angrily, Dr. Stockmann makes a speech in which he turns to biology to prove that there are indeed certain individuals “bred” to a superior apprehension of truths and who have the natural right to lead, if not to govern, the mass.
If the entire play is to be understood as the working-out of this speech, then one has no justification for contending that it is other than racist and fascist—certainly it could not be thought of as a defense of any democratic idea. But, structurally speaking, the theme is not wholly contained in the meeting scene alone. In fact, this speech is in some important respects in contradiction to the actual dramatic working-out of the play. But that Ibsen never really believed that idea in the first place is amply proved by a speech he delivered to a workers’ club after the production of An Enemy of the People. He said then: “Of course I do not mean the aristocracy of birth, or of the purse, or even the aristocracy of the intellect. I mean the aristocracy of character, of will, of mind—that alone can free us.”
I have taken as justification for removing those examples which no longer prove the theme—examples I believe Ibsen would have removed were he alive today—the line in the original manuscript that reads: “There is no established truth that can remain true for more than seventeen, eighteen, at most twenty years.” In light of genocide, the holocaust that has swept our world on the wings of the black ideology of racism, it is inconceivable that Ibsen would insist today that certain individuals are by breeding, or race, or “innate” qualities superior to others or possessed of the right to dictate to others. The man who wrote A Doll’s House, the clarion call for the equality of women, cannot be equated with a fascist. The whole cast of his thinking was such that he could not have lived a day under an authoritarian regime of any kind. He was an individualist sometimes to the point of anarchism, and in such a man there is too explosive a need for self-expression to permit him to conform to any rigid ideology. It i
s impossible, therefore, to set him beside Hitler.
3
On reading the standard translations of Ibsen’s work it quickly became obvious that the false impressions that have been connected with the man would seem to be justified were he to be produced in “translated” form. For one thing, his language in English sounds impossibly pedantic. Combine this with the fact that he wore a beard and half-lenses in his eyeglasses, and that his plays have always been set forth with yards of fringe on every tablecloth and drapery, and it was guaranteed that a new production on the traditional basis would truly bury the man for good.
I set out to transform his language into contemporary English. Working from a pidgin-English, word-for-word rendering of the Norwegian, done by Mr. Lars Nordenson, I was able to gather the meaning of each speech and scene without the obstruction of any kind of English construction.
For instance, Mr. Nordenson, working from the original Norwegian manuscript, set before me speeches such as: “But, dear Thomas, what have you then done to him again?” Or: “The Mayor being your brother, I would not wish to touch it, but you are as convinced as I am that truth goes ahead of all other considerations.” Or: “Well, what do you say, Doctor? Don’t you think it is high time that we stir a little life into the slackness and sloppiness of halfheartedness and cowardliness?” This last speech now reads: “Well, what do you say to a little hypodermic for these fence-sitting deadheads?”
It was possible to peer into the original play with as clear an eye as one could who knew no Norwegian. There were no English sentences to correct and rewrite, only the bare literalness of the original. This version of the play, then, is really in the nature of a new translation into spoken English.
But it is more too. The original has a tendency to indulge in transitions between scenes that are themselves uninteresting, and although as little as possible of the original construction has been changed and the play is exactly as it was, scene for scene, I have made each act seem of one piece, instead of separate scenes. And my reason for doing this is simply that the tradition of Ibsen’s theater allowed the opera-like separation of scenes, while ours demands that the audience never be conscious that a “scene” has taken place at all.
Structurally the largest change is in the third act—Ibsen’s fifth. In the original the actual dramatic end comes a little past the middle of the act, but it is followed by a wind-up that keeps winding endlessly to the curtain. I think this overwriting was the result of Ibsen’s insistence that his meaning be driven home—and from the front door right through to the back, lest the audience fail to understand him. Generally, in this act, I have brought out the meaning of the play in terms of dramatic action, action which was already there and didn’t need to be newly invented, but which was separated by tendentious speeches spoken into the blue.
Throughout the play I have tried to peel away its trappings of the moment, its relatively accidental details which ring the dull green tones of Victorianism, and to show that beneath them there still lives the terrible wrath of Henrik Ibsen, who could make a play as men make watches, precisely, intelligently, and telling not merely the minute and the hour but the age.
Ibsen’s Warning
1989
I don’t suppose anything has given me more gratification than the success of An Enemy of the People in its recent Young Vic production. I have made no secret of my early love for Ibsen’s work, and now to have been in some way responsible, along with some very fine young actors and a passionately perceptive director, for a new appreciation of one of his most central ideas, is something that puts a satisfying warmth in my belly.
It is a terrible thing to have to say, but the story of Enemy is far more applicable to our nature-despoiling societies than to even turn-of-the-century capitalism, untrammeled and raw as Ibsen knew it to be. The churning up of pristine forests, valleys and fields for minerals and the rights of way of the expanding rail systems is child’s play compared to some of our vast depredations, our atomic contamination and oil spills, to say nothing of the tainting of our food supply by carcinogenic chemicals.
It must be remembered, however, that for Ibsen the poisoning of the public water supply by mendacious and greedy interests was only the occasion of An Enemy of the People and is not, strictly speaking, its theme. That, of course, concerns the crushing of the dissenting spirit by the majority, and the right and obligation of such a spirit to exist at all. That he thought to link this moral struggle with the preservation of nature is perhaps not accidental. After all, he may well have found enough examples of moral cowardice and selfish antisocial behavior in other areas such as business, science, the ministry, the arts or where you will.
It is many years now since I looked into an Ibsen biography but I seem to recall that the genesis of Enemy was usually thought to be a news report of the poisoning of the water supply at a Hungarian spa. If there was a Dr. Stockmann prototype who vainly protested against keeping the public ignorant of the truth, I cannot recall it. But whether or not this was the overt stimulus behind the play the question still remains why Ibsen should have seized upon it so avidly—he wrote this play in a remarkably short time, a few weeks.
Thinking about his choice throws me back to Henry David Thoreau who likewise found in nature’s ruin the metaphor of man’s self-betrayal. And Thoreau, I think, stood within an intellectual tradition of distrust of progress, one that goes back to the Roman poets, and the concomitant age-old view of the city as inevitably decadent and the unspoiled country as noble. Where it comes to nature even radical artists are likely to be very conservative and suspicious of change; perhaps nature takes on even more of a pure moral value where religion itself has vanished into skepticism. The sky may be empty but to look out on untouched forest or a pristine lake is to see if not God or the gods, then at least their abandoned abode. Ibsen needed an absolute good for evil to work against, an unarguably worthy brightness for dark mendacity to threaten, and perhaps nature alone could offer him that. And, of course, this is even more effective in our time when people have to go to the supermarket to buy clean water.
I am sure that few in the first New York audience of the early Fifties were terribly convinced by the play’s warnings of danger to the environment. The anticommunist gale was blowing hard and it was the metaphor that stood in the foreground; moreover, in that time of blind belief in rational, responsible science, any suggestion that, for example, we might be building atomic generating plants that were actually unsafe would have simply been dismissed as dangerous obscurantist nonsense. And given my own identification with the Left, the metaphor was widely suspect as a mere ploy, an attempt to link the Reds, then under heavy attack, with Ibsen’s truth-bearer. So neither the story nor the metaphor could carry the credibility that they do now when both have been revalued as alarmingly prophetic instinctual conceptions—it often does indeed take moral courage to stand against commercial and governmental bureaucracies that care nothing for the survival of the real world outside their offices. It is but one more evidence that the artist’s powerful desire to penetrate life’s chaos, to make it meaningfully cohere, has literally created a truth as substantial as a sword for later generations to wield against their own oppression.
THE CRUCIBLE
Brewed in The Crucible
1958
One afternoon last week I attended a rehearsal of the imminent Off-Broadway production of The Crucible. For the first time in the five years since its opening on Broadway, I heard its dialogue, and the experience awakened not merely memories but the desire to fire a discussion among us of certain questions a play like this ought to have raised.
Notoriously, there is what is called a chemistry in the theater, a fusion of play, performance, and audience temper which, if it does not take place, leaves the elements of an explosion cold and to one side of art. For the critics, this seems to be what happened with The Crucible. It was not condemned; it was set aside. A cold thing, mainly, it lay to
one side of entertainment, to say nothing of art. In a word, I was told that I had not written another Death of a Salesman.
It is perhaps beyond my powers to make clear, but I had no desire to write another Salesman, and not because I lack love for that play but for some wider, less easily defined reasons that have to do with this whole question of cold and heat and, indeed, with the future of our drama altogether. It is the question of whether we—playwrights and audiences and critics—are to declare that we have reached the end, the last development of dramatic form. More specifically, the play designed to draw a tear; the play designed to “identify” the audience with its characters in the usual sense; the play that takes as its highest challenge the emotional relations of the family, for that, as it turns out, is what it comes to.
I was disappointed in the reaction to The Crucible not only for the obvious reasons but because no critic seemed to sense what I was after. In 1953 McCarthyism probably helped to make it appear that the play was bounded on all sides by its arraignment of the witch hunt. The political trajectory was so clear—a fact of which I am a little proud—that what to me were equally if not more important elements were totally ignored. The new production, appearing in a warmer climate, may, I hope, flower, and these inner petals may make their appropriate appearance.
What I say now may appear more technical than a writer has any business talking about in public. But I do not think it merely a question of technique to say that with all its excellences the kind of play we have come to accept without effort or question is standing at a dead end. What “moves” us is coming to be a narrower and narrower aesthetic fragment of life. I have shown, I think, that I am not unaware of psychology or immune to the fascinations of the neurotic hero, but I believe that it is no longer possible to contain the truth of the human situation so totally within a single man’s guts as the bulk of our plays presuppose. The documentation of man’s loneliness is not in itself and for itself ultimate wisdom, and the form this documentation inevitably assumes in playwriting is not the ultimate dramatic form.
Collected Essays Page 29