A community doctor, sanitarian and scientist, discovers that the waters of the city’s bathing station are contaminated. The samples are analyzed under the university’s microscopes, as the microbes were not visible to the naked eye. Bathhouse goers, in search of health, were getting sick. The doctor collects the water and secretly sends it to the university for analysis.
With the scientific evidence in hand, he asks that the alert be given to everyone and public measures to be taken. He sends the news to be published in the local newspaper, which will prevent new tourists from contaminating themselves. The spa, which is a private company SA, will have to carry out new works to capture clean water at another point and then reopen its doors. The diagnosis and solution seem correct and workable. But the pro-enlightenment, public health, and evidence-based position will suffer a severe setback.
Henrik Ibsen’s play, written 140 years ago, is hauntingly timely. On display in São Paulo at the Aliança Francesa Theater for the past two months, the production directed by José Fernando de Azevedo, a professor at ECA-USP, has as its protagonist a black actor, Rogério Brito, who plays with passion (and reason) the public health worker Doutor Thomas Stockmann for the present day – which introduces to Ibsen’s text a new dimension of race, time and place.
The Afro-diasporic reading of “The enemy of the people” is nothing new, as José Fernando explains: this was “the last play staged by the Teatro Experimental do Negro [dirigido por Abdias do Nascimento]in 1963”, on the eve of the military coup.
The black doctor/scientist, whom the powerful will oppose, is the bearer of freedom of thought, enlightenment, the defense of life and human dignity – against dominant interests. Character and actor who are intertwined with Brazil today, either with the mission of Cuban doctors, or with the expansion of blacks in medical courses, thanks to affirmative policies and quota access. If empathy with the protagonist increases, because he is black, there is no doubt that the scientific discourse of the sanitarian and the white coat are rarely associated in Brazil with black skins – which produces a dissonance from the start. The readings of race and gender are diverse in the montage, with half of the black cast, including one of the antagonists and avoiding ethnic Manichaeism.
The doctor is the protagonist imbued with the truth, but unprepared to understand the power game and interests that surround him, hence a certain idealistic naivety that makes him a quixotic hero in the face of the forces of order and business that will face his discovery. In the dramatic text, Ibsen not only praises science, but also free thinking and the ability to defend new causes and positions, taken forward by minorities and which have not yet been understood by the crowds, almost always manipulated by those in power, of the money and the media.
The black scientist is reprimanded by the mayor and his newspaper article is censored. He suffers from a conspiracy of the forces of backwardness, which react in defense of order. The mayor, the petty-bourgeoisie representative, the newspaper owner and the journalist and (hidden) the bathhouse shareholders manage to invert the narrative. In their version, the public health doctor would make everyone miserable, closing the resort, driving away tourists, ending jobs, ruining the city’s economy and reputation. The mayor anticipates that the costs of the works in the new water collection are high and would have to be assumed by the taxpayers, as the shareholders refuse to pay for this, and the owners of the tanneries, which contaminate the waters, are not brought to justice.
The conservative reaction is quick and acts as a group: it dominates the news, rejects scientific evidence (how can you believe in what “you can’t see with the naked eye”?), and treats the doctor like crazy – for which he pays with the price of lynching. morals, stoning of his house, dismissal and eviction.
José Fernando’s editing, however, reverses the game, without disrespecting the original text. In one of the last scenes, Ibsen builds an assembly, convened by Doctor Stockmann, since the local newspaper and trade associations do not give him a voice. He gets a shed by the harbor from a sailor friend to convene the population and tell the truth. Ibsen imagined the scene on stage, with actors forming the assembly that yells, interrupts and attacks the doctor. But in the Brazilian production, the assembly is made up of the play’s own audience. Actors seated in the middle of the audience try to follow Ibsen’s text, about the doctor’s moral lynching, but the audience actually reacts and defends it, acting opposite and inverting the result: the audience at the Aliança Francesa ultimately votes for the truth and in defense of the scientist. black. It remains for the mayor and the president of the owners’ association to manipulate the result of the vote, once again condemning the doctor as an “enemy of the people”, so that the play can follow the original text.
The moment, however, brings the audience learning about what they see and their ability to be indignant, react and choose the right side – which is defeated in the text, but not in life. Somehow, this public uprising, not to join, but to rebel against denialism and the forces of backwardness, brings Ibsen back to the present, in a country in turmoil, ruled by obscurantist forces, and which demands that the course of text and history are altered. After all, as stated by Ibsen in the voice of his protagonist: it is not just about sewage, but about the ethical and moral swamp in which we are mired – and from which we need to get out.
The play should return in theaters soon. And Ibsen’s text is available in publications in Portuguese, recently re-released by the publisher Carambaia. Art continues to illuminate life.
It is not by chance that the president this week vetoed the renewal of the Aldir Blanc Law (named in honor of the musician who died by Covid-19), which provided for R$ 3 billion annually to promote culture over the next 5 years. Who will be the real “enemy of the people”?
