EIF theatre reviews: A Trial - after An Enemy of the People | Hostile
Joyce McMillan gives her verdict on Oscar-nominated actor Wagner Moura’s EIF play A Trial and a supposed family show that’s confused about its purpose
A Trial - after An Enemy Of The People ★★★★★
Lyceum Theatre, until 10 August
Not a production of Ibsen’s great 1882 play, but a blazingly brilliant 21st century response to it, award-winning Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy’s A Trial - After an Enemy of the People took the Lyceum by storm this weekend, as it opened the 2026 Festival theatre programme.
Co-created by Jatahy with the show’s charismatic and magnificent star Wagner Moura, A Trial takes the vital moral and political questions raised in Ibsen’s play, and places them in a new, reimagined setting: a theatre turned public courtroom, where the hero, Thomas Stockman, is brought to trial on the charge of being an enemy of the people, and where the audience itself – represented by eleven of us, chosen by lot – act as judges and jury.
The question Ibsen asks, of course, is one that could hardly be more important for our time. In a world dominated by the twin gods of endless economic growth and raw political populism, what does it cost to continue to live by a moral code that also values truth, justice and human life? Is it even right to try to do so, given the pain society can inflict on the loved ones and communities of those who refuse to conform? Or does it – as Stockman’s brother and accuser now alleges – border on the anti-democratic, elitist and fascist?
Stockman, the town doctor and scientist who insists on revealing that the water in the town’s economically vital new spa development is hopelessly contaminated, is a man eventually crucified for his honesty, as the furious townsfolk destroy his family; and Moura not only plays Stockman with an irresistible and tormented intensity, but also, in his own voice, introduces the drama to us as a painfully potent play for today, set in a Brazil riven by the same deep political polarities that now stalk much of the world.
The effect is electrifying, as the play’s two-and-a-quarter hours flash by at riveting speed. And every detail of Jatahy’s superb production – from Julia Bernat’s beautiful performance as the daughter who acts as Stockman’s defence lawyer, to the perfectly co-ordinated and sometimes heart-wrenching video and online evidence – works perfectly to draw the audience straight to the heart of Ibsen’s story; in an evening of theatre that is never falsely comforting, but full of the sheer, pulsing exhilaration of those rare moments when human beings come together to confront the raw truth of the moment we now face - and to face it together, with humour, intelligence, justice, and compassion. Joyce McMillan
Hostile ★★★
Church Hill Theatre, until 11 August
The French theatre company Bakelite are no strangers to Edinburgh, after visits to the international children’s festival and Edinburgh’s object theatre festival Manipulate; and their latest work, Hostile, is billed as this year’s Edinburgh International Festival show for families.
Created and performed by the company’s inspired founder Olivier Rannou, the show features a large but wrecked human figure stranded in a blazing American desert bereft of water or life, apart from the occasional cactus or rattlesnake.
In classic Bakelite style, Rannou’s character responds with his hammer, saw and pliers, snipping an electric wire to shift the blistering sun, and hauling on and off stage some amazing wooden contraptions representing a broken-down horse, an entire herd of irritatingly unmilkable animals, and eventually a full-blown saloon, complete with piano-player, which he proceeds to shoot up.
That the show represents an ingenious, entertaining and poignant satire on the current plight of western civilisation, and on one of its American founding myths, is undeniable.
What it is not, though, is a family show. Despite its short length, its mood and rhythm is middle-aged, melancholy and absurdist, looking back to the cowboy culture of the mid 20th century. And in the end, that lack of clarity about the show’s purpose seems to blur and weaken both its imagery and its narrative arc; which are often more tragic than amusing, and always deeply, bitterly ironic. Joyce McMillan
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