Tune in today to the live broadcast of An Enemy of the People on our YouTube Channel! This special event will take place on June 24 at 12pm EDT / 7pm EEST in Athens, Greece on the stage of Stavros Niarchos Hall, home of the Greek National Opera, and will feature performances by Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man, Poor Things), Jason Isaacs (The White Lotus, Harry Potter), Brían F. O’Byrne (Conclave, Million Dollar Baby), Frankie Faison (Coming to America, The Wire), Rafika Chawishe (Dangerous Truth, Miss Violence), Marjolaine Goldsmith (Company Manager, Theater of War Productions), and Laurie Eustis (poet). These actors will be joined by members of the SNF Nostos Youth Advisory Committee, a group of sixteen young people from four continents, who will play Citizens in the play’s famous town hall scene.
We are delighted to be performing in 2026 SNF Nostos Festival alongside an amazing lineup in Athens, including David Byrne, The Flaming Lips, Gorillaz, John Cleese, and more. We will be going live throughout the week. Follow us on Instagram to join us backstage and behind the scenes!
This play obviously has become increasingly popular in the Trump era and has been brought to the public by a variety of gifted actors, activists and specialists. Though perhaps it is worth recalling that when Arthur Miller adapted the play in the fifties, and attempting to portray Stockman as a hero of the people he felt it necessary to edit out Stockman’s and Ibsen’s anti democratic sensibilities. Like a number of other 19th century intellectuals Ibsen rejected majority rule democracy, insisting that the majority is never right, and an elitist activist class was necessary to save them from their ignorance and blindness. No doubt this is a very elaborate production and I hope to view it, but I can’t help but feel that a number of these adaptations fail to ask the right question, the same question Ibsen tried to answer, though driven by bitterness over attacks on him in Norway which drove him into years of self-imposed exile in Italy—does democracy work in the ways we intend?