In ‘An Enemy of the People,’ Jeremy Strong Finds His Way From ‘Succession’ to Broadway

It isn’t such a leap for Jeremy Strong, famed for playing Kendall Roy in Succession, to play the suddenly demonized local doctor Thomas Stockmann in Amy Herzog’s new Broadway adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. (Circle in the Square, booking through June 16).

For one, both Succession and this adaptation, directed by Sam Gold (who is married to Herzog) know how to crunchily position drama and wit, profundity and comedy, alongside one another. This brilliant Enemy of the People is notably funny in both its smarts and pacing, and even its later gathering darkness—when Stockmann is viciously trounced and isolated by his townsfolk—is studded with light, and the certainty of his self-preservation.

Both Kendall and Thomas are both different breeds of a broader genus of black sheep—zealously attached to following their own paths, both convinced of their rightness and righteousness, and to hell with anyone who doesn’t follow them. They will court you for your support, but stay true only to their own inner compasses, moral and otherwise. Both Kendall and Stockmann are happy to be their own human islands, come what may. The tension watching Enemy of the People is ours, rather than theirs—observing what this town’s present and future is, and its vibrating significance for the future of our own compromised, fragile democracy.

Read more at The Daily Beast.