Two middle-aged brothers, Dr. Stockmann and Mayor Stockmann, are played by Ric Reid and William Vickers, respectively. Acting as polar opposites, they conveniently symbolize the ‘Body Politic’ in dead-heat confrontation with ‘Science.’ Sibling rivalry prevails; squabbles originating in the playpen begin to foreshadow the ‘Cain versus Abel’ legend.

There’s the downright brilliance of verbal sophistry buzzing around in the guise of rhetoric: the small town’s power-mongers bent on scare-mongering, manipulating or muzzling the trouble-makers. Public persuasion, honed to a fine art, becomes a barrage of denials, innuendo, accusations, sticky bribes and bare-bones threats.

In the meantime, the play’s cast of actors seems all too heavy with the male presence; the plucky women of the household are mostly subjugated in their roles. Male ‘movers and shakers’ jockey and strut, parade or conceal their motives, their wacky or reasoned perceptions of what is actually going on.

Threatened individuals cling to the ladder of survival. Once stirred into action, the town populace becomes a rampaging herd that charges first in one, then the other direction. The tainted watering-hole reflects the infected morals of the ‘not-so-silent’ majority, the terrorizing prospect of mob rule.

What is certain—the playwright revisits our century as environmental prophet, casting a mighty shadow all the way to the new millennium. Witness the continuous outcry about the environment and the corresponding public denials; acknowledge our communal fatalism and inertia, bolstered by self-interest in a cherished collective lifestyle. As Ibsen shows, despite the public protests of the few, the democratic-demographic surge of mankind remains poised to go down, en masse, together.

Miles Potter has been working in Canadian theatre for over thirty years, and he has directed plays at virtually every major Canadian theatre. Stratford Festival productions include Medea, Romeo and Juliet, Good Mother, The Glass Menagerie, and Orpheus Descending, which went on to a successful run at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre. Recent productions include The Taming of the Shrew (Bard on the Beach, Vancouver), Shakespeare’s Will (Stratford), and Could You Wait (Grand Theatre, London, Ont.). Montreal productions at the Centaur include Picasso at the Lapin Agile (les Masques award) and Arms and the Man. He has been a guest director at the National Theatre School, Dalhousie University, George Brown College and the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Miles has directed thirteen productions for the Manitoba Theatre Centre, and was the original dramaturge and director of Michael Healy's play The Drawer Boy at Theatre Passe Muraille for which he received a Dora Mavor Moore Award. When not working, Miles lives in the Ontario village of Harrington where he gardens, reads, and hangs out with son Callan and wife Seana McKenna.

Known as the Father of Modern Drama, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) is among the most famous modern playwrights. He is the author of such dramas as Peer Gynt (1867), A Doll's House (1879) and When We Dead Awaken (1899). His first play was published and performed in 1850 (Catiline), the same year he moved to Christiana (now Oslo). He traveled abroad for nearly thirty years (living in Rome, Dresden and Munich), wrote plays and directed a variety of theatre companies. During his lifetime he earned an international reputation for his psychological dramas that frequently commented on social issues of the day. His plays are still among the most frequently performed in the world. Ibsen wrote An Enemy of the People in response to the public outcry against his play, Ghosts, which was considered scandalous for the time as it challenged the hypocrisy of Victorian morality and was deemed indecent for its veiled references to syphilis.

Arthur Miller was an American dramatist, (1915-2005), whose works are concerned with the responsibility of each individual to other members of society. Simply and colloquially written, Miller’s plays sprang from his social conscience and from his compassion for those who are vulnerable to the false values imposed on them by society.