Why Ibsen’s Enemy of the People keeps striking chords

In the past, including last year’s Tarragon production, the doctor was always a man. This time, the embattled doctor is a woman, played by Laura Condlln.

But Toronto’s dance with Enemy of the People goes back almost half a century. And John Kastner, now best known as the winner of International Emmy Awards for directing groundbreaking documentaries, has vivid memories of being a young actor in both a 1960 CBC-TV version of Enemy shot in Toronto and a 1959 stage production that was the opening attraction for a new theatre, the Central Library Theatre upstairs in the old Toronto Reference Library.

Tarragon artistic director Richard Rose staged both the 2014 production and the 2015 one, using a new version from a Berlin theatre. It includes a chance for audience involvement.

In 2014, for the audience, Enemy was all about former Toronto mayor Rob Ford. This year it is likely to be all about the federal election. The feminist Dr. Stockmann could be a precursor of Naomi Klein and the text may seem to echo the documentary This Changes Everything, directed by Avi Lewis (Klein’s husband) and recently seen at the Toronto International Film Festival.

As for the villains who keep insisting that the economy is what matters, not the environment, surely the audience will be reminded of Stephen Harper.

Meanwhile, I am still haunted by the Shaw Festival’s unforgettable production — in a new, much shorter adaptation — of Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea. In that play, as in A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler, Ibsen focused on a woman who had an unstoppable need to break away from the constraints of a respectable, conventional marriage and satisfy her deepest yearnings.

Lady’s title role sparked legendary performances by Vanessa Redgrave in New York and years later in London by her daughter, Natasha Richardson. But Lady is not produced nearly as often as Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, Doll’s House and Enemy, and I had never seen it until recently at Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Court House Theatre.

The Shaw’s production was a triumph for Moya O’Connell, a talented member of the company, and it would be great if that production could be restaged in Toronto.

Getting back to Enemy, John Scott played Dr. Stockmann in the 1959 Central Library production. Kastner, then in junior high school at Forest Hill Collegiate, was in the supporting cast and so was his brother, the late Peter Kastner, who later played the starring role in the 1966 Hollywood movie You’re a Big Boy Now, the first mainstream feature directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

“It was a thrilling production,” John Kastner recalls, staged in the round by Basya Hunter, whose views on acting were influenced by Constantin Stanislavski.

A year later, for a live CBC-TV version of Enemy starring Leslie Nielsen as Dr. Stockmann, John Kastner took over the role his brother Peter had played at the Central Library. That’s because the director of the TV version had seen the Central Library production.

The cast was a Who’s Who of Canadian acting luminaries of the era, Kastner says, including Douglas Rain, Frances Hyland, Mavor Moore, John Drainie, Tony Van Bridge, Al Waxman and Gordon Pinsent.

“Performing on live television was scary,” Kastner remembers, “but it gave a real jolt of electricity to our performances. I was embarrassed, though, facing my junior high classmates the next day: a big boy being such a crybaby on TV!”

Next door to the CBC’s Sumach St. studios a new TV version of The Importance of Being Earnest was being rehearsed and Dame Edith Evans had arrived to reprise her performance as Lady Bracknell in the 1952 movie. In the hallways, actors were imitating her famous outburst of indignation: “A handbag?”

Kastner called the imperious Dame Edith at her hotel seeking an interview. That prompted another crescendo of disbelief and indignation in that famous voice: “For a junior high school newspaper? I suggest you speak to my secretary!”

mknelman@thestar.ca