A Trial: After An Enemy of the People review – Wagner Moura upends Ibsen and keeps us guessing

Lyceum theatre, EdinburghAt the Edinburgh international festival, the Narcos star and director Christiane Jatahy transform the 1882 classic into a resonant, fourth wall-breaking event This dramatised trial takes Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play about a man’s campaign to expose the secret scandal of contaminated water in his town and turns it into a modern day interrogation: of speaking out versus remaining silent, of a family at war and of fiction and reality itself. In fact, is this a drama at all? It starts off as such but minutes later, the celebrated Brazilian screen actor Wagner Moura, playing Ibsen’s Thomas Stockmann, seemingly breaks character to talk to us directly. Stockmann still sits invisibly on stage and we as an audience are here to judge him, he says, before returning to inhabit him. So Stockmann’s trial begins. Here he is: a family man living in contemporary Brazil, in a spa town whose tourism is dependent on the water that he insists is poisoning people. Is he a heroic truth-teller, belligerent anti-hero or self-serving villain? A 12-strong jury made up of audience members (have actors infiltrated this lineup? We don’t know, it is all uncertain ground) are called