Here’s a small list of reviews of An Enemy of the People from the most known news sites that highlight Jessica’s part:
Smith is well supported by the rest of the ensemble. Jessica Brown-Findlay (Downton Abbey) finds the right balance as Stockmann’s wife Kat, a person who struggles between loyalty to her husband, whilst reckoning with his undeniable flaws. There are 20th-century music cues throughout the show, including Oasis’s Stand by Me and multiple tracks from The Clash’s London Calling. Most notably, David Bowie’s Changes is heard on multiple occasions. At various points, the actors are singing and playing instruments. At first, it feels a little obvious, as if the songs are explicitly telling the audience how they’re meant to feel. As the play builds to its final crescendo, there is a more deliberate reasoning for the way it is used. During some of the more intense sequences, music is used not as a tool for fighting oppression, but as a way to ignore it.
Stockmann is a firebrand in turn-up jeans opposite his town major brother, Peter (Paul Hilton), sour and self-righteous in a suit. His wife, Katharina (Jessica Brown Findlay), is a schoolteacher (rather than his teacher daughter, Petra, of the original script). They are new parents in the present day yet the milieu, with guitars, singalongs and the couple’s fellow band members who wander across the Stockmanns’ home, give it the sense of a 1960s commune. Not all of it works: Katharina is a cypher whose illicit kiss with a character goes nowhere.
A deliciously punchy final third sees Stockmann and Katharina reckon with the fallout from his meltdown. It’s hard to exact say where Ibsen starts, Ostermeier and Borchmeyer begin and Macmillan continues, but for a production conceived with the specific backdrop of post credit crunch Germany, it slots immaculately into 2024 Britain, the town’s desperation to save the spa chiming perfect with the recent spate of bankrupt English councils.
The chemistry between Smith and Jessica Brown Findlay as the doctor’s wife, Katharina Stockmann, is easy, while Paul Hilton steals the show throughout with his hilarious, yet ominous, portrayal of the doctor’s brother and mayor of the town, Peter Stockmann. For any audience members unsure on how they feel, the ending will be what secures An Enemy of the People as one for the ages. A small and mesmerising moment between Smith’s Stockmann and Findlay’s Katharina had every audience member leaving asking themselves and each other the one big question upon which everything hinges: “What would you do?”