Somewhere between the balm of a "courageous attempt" and the sting of a painful and wearisome failure lies the Harvard Dramatic Club's fall production for 1947. That it is brave to attempt the resurrection of a mouldering and awkward work by Henrik Ibsen can hardly be denied; the question is whether sufficient resources lie behind the bravado to justify the effort.

"An Enemy of the People" deals with the root problem of democracy: are the common people, the "popular majority," competent to rule, or should the government be entrusted to the superior few, the intellectual supermen? The theme is alive today as it has never been before, and yet Ibsen's play fails to make it live on the stage.

Bernard Shaw's treatment of the identical theme demonstrates Ibsen's inadequacy. Taking his semifaseist philosophy partially from the Norwegian playwright himself, Shaw builds an effective and convincing argument in "Heartbreak House" and other plays because his technique--his language, ideas, and situations--is bright and sharp enough to carry his doctrine. Ibsen bases his philosophic appeal on a situation that falls flat, on characters that are crude white and blackest black. The language--whether his fault or that of the translator--is so stilted, so drab that it tends to mire the play in a morass of monotony.

What makes the HDC production a failure is that it has not succeeded even partially in overcoming the faults of the play without adding contrasting flaws. Director Ted Allegretti evidently decided to attack the deadliness of the situation and language in the first act with nothing more nor less than speed. Racing through their lines as if the second act had to go on the air at 9 o'clock, the cast smashes the two opening scenes into a paroxysmal mishmash of words. Later other devices are used to try to break the monotony and color the action; incongruous comedy, grotesque acting gestures, and banal audience participation.

William West, playing the lead role of Dr. Stockmann, is to a large degree responsible for the crumbling of the play into atomized hysteria. Through the first two acts he dashed headlong through his lines, cut in on his cues before lines were finished, and strutted about, the stage with his head slightly bowed and his hands shifting at irregular intervals from his coat lapels to unpleasant gestures. In the final act West slowed down enough to give some meaning to his lines, but he never managed to get across the admittedly poorly presented ideas of Stockmann. Jack Hodges, playing Stockmann's brother, was a welcome antidote with his well-paced, intelligent delivery, and Robert Miller contributed a bit of professional--though perhaps inaccurate--comedy.

The staging was the production at its best. The group demonstrated that it is possible to turn Sanders into a modern proscenium theatre, but the symbolistic settings it provided, though good-looking and original, did little to relieve the drabness of the play.