“Um Inimigo do Povo”: When Lisbon’s Immigrants Step Onstage to Tell Their Own Story

In December 2024, Lisbon’s Rua do Benformoso was turned into a theatre of humiliation. Police officers lined up dozens of residents — mostly men from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan — against the wall in what they called a “special operation of criminal prevention.” Hands up, papers out, faces to the wall. It was almost Christmas.

To the rest of Lisbon, it was another day of “public safety.”
To filmmaker and stage director Marco Martins, it was a turning point.

Nearly a year later, Martins returns with a new production titled Um Inimigo do Povo (An Enemy of the People), premiering December 13 and 14 at Theatro Circo, as part of Braga Capital of Culture 2025. Inspired by that very police operation, Martins’ adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s classic transforms a 19th-century Norwegian moral parable into a raw reflection on Portugal’s fractured relationship with immigration.

This isn’t Ibsen in translation — it’s Ibsen rewritten from the street.
And the cast? Immigrants from the South Asian subcontinent, some of whom live and work in Mouraria, one of Lisbon’s most multicultural (and most policed) neighborhoods.

The performance unfolds in Portuguese, English, Bengali, and other languages, mirroring the city’s own polyphonic reality — one where linguistic diversity is both beauty and barrier.

A Theatre of the Excluded

“The raid was inexplicable,” Martins told Lusa. “But it revealed something paradigmatic — the way our society looks at immigration, the way it uses fear and bureaucracy to maintain distance.”

For decades, Rua do Benformoso has been home to Lisbon’s invisible workers: cooks, barbers, couriers, tailors, and shopkeepers who keep the city running but remain outside its cultural self-image. When the police descended that night, they didn’t just search bodies — they exposed a hierarchy of belonging.

By casting the very people who lived through that experience, Martins reverses the gaze. Onstage, they are no longer suspects — they are citizens of a new moral republic, where testimony replaces accusation and vulnerability becomes power.

From Ibsen’s Doctor to Lisbon’s Migrant

Ibsen’s original An Enemy of the People (1882) centers on a doctor ostracized for exposing contamination in his town’s spa. Martins’ version relocates the ethical crisis from a Norwegian bathhouse to a Portuguese alleyway. The “contamination” is no longer literal — it’s ideological. It’s the subtle racism of everyday life, the contamination of empathy by suspicion.

The doctor’s speech about “the tyranny of the majority” resonates painfully in a Europe where immigration policy often mirrors populist paranoia.
In Martins’ adaptation, the enemy is not the whistleblower — it’s the collective blindness that allows injustice to continue under the banner of “public order.”

A New Kind of Ensemble

Martins has spent years working with non-professional actors. His acclaimed projects like Provisional Figures (about precarious workers) and Arena (set in a boxing gym) blurred the line between performance and lived experience.
In Um Inimigo do Povo, he continues that method, not as an aesthetic experiment but as social testimony.

The rehearsals, according to Martins, became “spaces of translation — not only between languages but between realities.”
Bengali workers shared their stories of police checks, visa struggles, and isolation. Portuguese performers confronted their own privilege and complicity.
The stage became a small-scale rehearsal for a country learning how to coexist.

Portugal’s Silent Contradiction

Portugal likes to think of itself as a nation of gentle colonial nostalgia — friendly, tolerant, “open to the world.”
But in Lisbon’s immigrant districts, the dream fractures. Thousands work long shifts for minimal wages, sleep in shared rooms, and navigate a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that confuses paperwork with belonging. The December 2024 raid was just one episode in a growing pattern of racialized policing, often ignored by mainstream media.

By turning that trauma into collective performance, Martins challenges Portugal’s self-image as a “post-racial” society. His theatre doesn’t comfort — it confronts.

A Stage for Dissonance

When the curtain rises in Braga this December, the audience won’t just hear Ibsen’s words — they’ll hear accents, inflections, and rhythms that rarely echo in national theatres. The mix of Portuguese, English, and Bengali will feel disorienting, and that’s the point.
Because for many of those onstage, disorientation is daily life.

Each language becomes a form of resistance:

Bengali for memory, Portuguese for survival, English for mediation.

Together, they create a fragile harmony that feels truer than any monologue.

The Public as the Real Enemy

Ibsen’s play ends with the doctor declaring, “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” In Martins’ version, that solitude feels collective.
The migrant workers stand together — not as heroes, but as witnesses. They’ve been told to “integrate,” to “adapt,” to stay invisible. Now they speak back.

In a way, Martins’ “enemy of the people” is not the outsider — it’s the complacent insider. The citizen who sees injustice and looks away.

That’s what makes this production more than theatre. It’s a civic act — one that invites Portugal to confront itself, language by language, silence by silence.

“Um Inimigo do Povo” premieres December 13–14 at Theatro Circo, Braga, as part of Braga Capital da Cultura 2025.