Hand program notes

What you are about to see tonight, is a version of An Enemy of the People, by the great Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. We started to work from the original in Spanish, we made the first editing there. We took one of the secondary characters out of the play, since, according to our referents, it would darken the efficiency of the text in our environment. Then we found the version written by Arthur Miller in the 50’s. This version was written during a very precise period in the American history, McCarthyism. The way Miller approached the play, after having worked with Ibsen’s original, was a revelation. Miller would trim and adjust the passages from the classic, he translated and fine-tuned the political discourse of the XX century in an acute way; as well as the debates and the civic and social ideas brought about by Ibsen. Miller brought all this up to circulation, to the necessary orbit, as if giving Ibsen the opportunity to talk again, to provoke scandal, to be polemic and listened to in today’s terms, using the precise words of today’s social debate, of today’s forum, or those of his time, to be more exact. Miller would trim all the rhetorical excess in the play, he would concentrate Stockman’s ideas, the main character, so that his speech would be as efficient as back in the XIX century, when the play turned out to be an important forum for public debate on the conflicting relationship between the individual and the collective. Miller introduced an important change in the play, the ending. Out of the two endings, Ibsen’s, more meditating, more philosophical; and Miller’s more aggressive, we chose the latter. We really worked with Miller’s tremendous and moving version from the beginning; it is his homage to his indisputable maestro.
I wouldn’t like to use the word montage to define our work with this play. I would rather use the word dialog, conversation with Ibsen-Miller. We had to discuss a lot so that these versions become ours, being credible and vital; we didn’t want to become simple carriers of another person’s ideas. What you will see tonight is a long journey of conversations with Ibsen-Miller, it is us speaking at times, it is also them in other moments.
The whole world is commemorating the hundredth anniversary of Ibsen’s death, the activities in honor of the great renovator of the European scene will be multiple and deserved. We wanted to join the general commemoration with this work, and we do it celebrating, as well, the tenth anniversary of non-stop work of Argos Teatro.

Carlos Celdrán