Word: stockmann
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...STOCKMANN Malvern...
...long denunciation of Bolingbroke is superb acting. There is something noble and thrilling about an individual in the right willing to oppose the mob in the wrong even though he may be scaling his own doom. Thus has it always been: Antigone, Saint Joan, Sir Thomas More, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, Martin Luther King. Carlisle is of their company. In the play's final scene, Bolingbroke sentences Carlisle to live as a perpetual anchorite. Yet when Bolingbroke in the end decides to make a voyage of penance to the Holy Land, Waring's Carlisle, in a splendid touch, has the grandness...
Earl Montgomery, as Doctor Stockmann, has much of the bearing of a "matinee idol," and appears much younger than his wife, admirably portrayed by Lois Holmes. Art Smith, as Morton Kiil, presents a striking portrait of her shrewd and disreputable father. Gene Frankel's direction is adept and certain touches are superb. Yet with the children, who add more distraction than depth, his direction is spotty and they generally dash onstage with a gust, then settle into the shadows to await their lines...
Ibsen, whose own uncompromising plays had been harshly excoriated,, wrote much of his own emotion into Dr. Stock-mann. In Stockmann's plight he saw vindicated his distrust of majorities, his feeling that the sheep can be as dangerous as the wolves. "The minority," he wrote to Critic Georg Brandes while working on An Enemy, "is always right." Like Stock-mann, Ibsen would not be silenced; like Stockmann, he accepted almost exultantly the loneliness of leadership...
Arthur (Death of a Salesman) Miller's Enemy is a shortened, sharpened, slanged-up version, with some new blood replacing the old, flaccid, translator's English. And Fredric March plays Stockmann with helpful vigor. But Miller has given the play a more agitated but less striking face. His version is not so much bitter satire as topical melodrama (with some of the new blood smeared on the characters' foreheads). It is not so much an affirmation of minority rightness as a plea for minority rights; it suggests a man persecuted less for telling the unpalatable truth than...