The public enemy is a woman

In 1906 Fredrikke Nielsen, 69-year-old Norwegian actor and pioneer, travelled to Kristiania for the state funeral of Henrik Ibsen. Half a century earlier, Nielsen had electrified National Theatre audiences at Bergen in the role of Hørdis in The Vikings at Helgoland, the first of a string of Ibsen heroines she was to play for the next 25 years before joining the Methodist assembly in the US to fight from the pulpit for the rights of women and single mothers. Taking her place in the ten thousand strong funeral procession, Nielsen laid a wreath and gave a short speech thanking Ibsen for the gift of all those great female stage roles. We can now thank Ibsen for giving us another. The female Dr Stockmann currently treading the boards at the Belvoir Street Theatre is no gimmick for the times; the times themselves have seen to that. If anything, Kate Mulvaney’s Dr Stockmann is timelier than one might wish. Waiting for the show to start in the theatre foyer, I pondered how a female Dr Stockmann would alter the balance of Ibsen’s contentious classic. Would the sibling rivalry be as fierce? Would Mrs Stockmann be missed? (Who else can ballast the ballooning ego of her eccentric husband, who, before his key insight into the listlessness of the liberal majority, comically imagines the townsfolk organising a parade in his honour?) Most critically of all, would the #Me Too movement loom too conspicuously out of the background, obscuring Ibsen’s message about the mindless me-tooism of public opinion? Director Anne-Louise Sarks and scriptwriter Melissa Reeves have each given careful thought to questions in this line. A good adaptation is like a good translation: it works across the entire piece.