Designer Timian Alsaker shows that austerity can be beautiful, with a 1930s set that looks as gleamingly spartan as a diet doctor's health regimen.The bad news is the production is unevenly acted (the star and the women who play his wife and daughter are good; everyone else: not so much), and the director thinks the story of a scientist who proves the Baths that are a small town's source of income are toxic (and therefore meets strong resistance to his going public with the information) is a metaphor for Global Warming and a morality tale about whistle-blowers. Snort.
Still, in spite of the quite dated feeling of the text (the hero's heady, brink-of-discovery enthusiasm is a bit hard to take --are any progressives you know innocent as opposed to cynical?), there's some food for thought in the play, even if it doesn't lie where the director thinks it does. The story seems to be Ibsen's take on Plato's Apology, with Science standing in for Philosophy as the source of Truth. In the first act, the scientist is like Socrates --all he asks is the right to speak the truth he knows. The fact that his "truth" is in tension with the town's entire way of life is the problem the action must resolve.
In the second act, however, the scientist sets aside his relatively modest request and demands something Socrates never did --he demands to rule. Not that he literally asks to be elected mayor of the town, but at a town hall meeting, rather than sticking to what he knows about the toxic baths, he denounces the entire citizenry for their ignorance and, finding himself opposed by political and financial forces, admits that he'd see every single inhabitant of the town dead before he'd back off his own discoveries in the slightest (so then the point of saving them from toxins would be what?). Hmm. Actually that does sound a bit like Global Warming theorists after all. The problem with the Philospher is he's the most fit to rule but he doesn't want to; the Scientist isn't fit to rule --he has no notion of what is truly human--but insists that because he has the facts, he must.
Mr. Weed & I disagree about where Ibsen's sympathies lie. He says we're meant to identify with the Scientist simply. I say the last line of the play tellingly reveals how unfit Science is to rule. Standing in the ruins of his house (which an angry mob has pummelled with rocks), the Doctor proclaims
That man is strongest who stands most alone.If you're alone, what exactly are you going to rule? Moreover, he utters these words to his wife and daughter, who've stood by him through all the action --he hasn't even the self-awareness to know he's not been alone for one moment. Even with facts on his side, he doesn't even rule himself.
