KIERAN Hurley is one of the leading Scottish dramatists to emerge in the new millennium. His 2012 hit play Beats, which considers 1990s rave culture and the then Tory government’s draconian response to it, was adapted for the big screen in 2019 by director Brian Welsh.

In 2018, Hurley’s play Mouthpiece, a metatheatrical drama about the relationship between a female Edinburgh playwright and a young man from one of the city’s impoverished housing schemes, received many critical plaudits.

Now the dramatist has turned his attention to the classic play An Enemy of the People, the 1882 opus by the Norwegian bard Henrik Ibsen. Re-titled The Enemy and re-located to contemporary Scotland, Hurley’s adaptation was set to preview in Greenock last night, opening at the Dundee Rep theatre this coming week.

In fashioning a new version of a classic play, Hurley is joining a distinguished line of Scottish playwrights. For instance, Liz Lochhead has delighted audiences with her numerous Scots versions of plays by the French comic master Molière (including Tartuffe and, her take on The Misanthrope, wonderfully titled Miseryguts). Zinnie Harris, David Harrower and David Greig have also penned celebrated adaptations of plays by such great dramatists as Aeschylus, Büchner and Strindberg.

In Ibsen’s play, the titular “enemy of the people” Dr Thomas Stockmann, the medical officer of a recently opened spa in a small Norwegian town, discovers that the water in the new facility is contaminated. Determined to alert the townsfolk, and wider society, to the dangers the pollution represents, he finds himself in conflict with powerful vested interests, for whom economic imperatives trump matters of public health. The drama hinges on how the people themselves respond to this conflict.

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The play is remarkably relevant to our times. The question of profit versus public health is to the fore in the Covid pandemic.

Vast profits are being made by big pharma and a massive gulf in vaccination has developed between rich countries and developing nations. Intriguingly, by far the greatest attention to side effects has been given to the not-for-profit AstraZeneca vaccine.

Hurley’s adaptation of Ibsen germinated in 2016, three years prior to the beginning of the current public health emergency, but it is, nevertheless, very much of the here and now. The play is set, the dramatist explains, in a “fictional, unnamed, small, Scottish town that is a stand-in for a lot of de-industrialised Scotland.”

The town is, he continues, “subject to a massive, top-down regeneration programme” in which general prosperity is promised by the development of a huge, indoor, thermally heated beach holiday resort (the kind of thing Donald Trump might build if he bought Center Parcs). However, as in Ibsen’s play, there is a problem.

One of the founding directors of the new complex, Kirsten Stockmann, who grew up in the town, discovers a poison in the resort’s water supply. However, Stockmann’s efforts to have the project shut down on public health grounds meet with economically driven resistance, not least from her own sister, who is leader of the local council.

As even this brief outline makes clear, the plot of Hurley’s play, although set in the 21st century, is extremely faithful to Ibsen’s original. Which makes it all the more remarkable, not only that the Norwegian’s drama is so easily translated to post-industrial Scotland, but also that its big ideas fit so well with the politics of the coronavirus pandemic.

Ibsen’s play is, Hurley comments, “about principles of scientific, rational enlightenment [being] pitted against a popular will that maybe has been politically manufactured for nefarious ends. There are things going on there that feel timely, given some of the things that we’re living through just now.”

In addition to these big, political and philosophical questions, the playwright adds, his version of Ibsen’s drama extends the personal dimension in the piece. Hurley’s adaptation foregrounds the question of “the point at which you settle against your own ideals and principles in the interests of an easy life and securing financial stability for yourself and your family.”

That is the dilemma that faces his protagonist, Kirsten Stockmann. “She was a bit of a firebrand radical in her youth,” he explains.

“She’s taken this big job [with the indoor resort project] to try to work within the system to improve people’s lives.”

However, Stockmann finds herself caught repeatedly between the self-sacrifice that is implied by her principles and the economic security of both herself and her daughter. Suppressing her findings regarding the contaminated water supply would certainly be to her financial benefit.

This idea of a trade-off between an urgent, scientifically evidenced course of action and an opportunity to turn a profit will be instantly recognisable to anyone who is engaged in the climate change debate. On the one hand, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson proclaims that the forthcoming COP26 conference in Glasgow could mark “the beginning of the end for climate change”, whilst, on the other, he refuses to block the possible development of a new oilfield at Cambo in Shetland.

Hurley believes his Ibsen adaptation is sufficiently open to relate to such issues. It is, he says, “slightly allegorical in its storytelling”.

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“Characters have strange names that are hybrids of Scottish and Norwegian names. The town doesn’t have a name. So, the whole thing has the feel of a social allegory.”

HURLEY’S play is directed by actor-turned-director Finn den Hertog, and performed by a cast that includes such outstanding actors as Hannah Donaldson, Gabriel Quigley, Neil McKinven and Billy Mack.

“It’s a real honour,” the playwright says, to be working with such a superb cast.

“There’s something completely thrilling about watching the play come to life when these brilliant actors wrap themselves around it. There’s always so much that happens… when the words are finally embodied in space by people with such talent and smart minds as this cast.

“That’s where the good stuff happens, in the rehearsal room. That’s what we’ve missed during the pandemic.”

The Enemy tours Scotland until November 6. For further information, visit: nationaltheatrescotland.com