William Flatau spent the better part of three decades managing a property portfolio in Southfields. This January, he made a New Year’s resolution: finally try acting. He found Carlton Theatre Group, auditioned, and landed the role of the Polish drunk in a 130-year-old Norwegian play about a woman who discovers that her town’s water supply is contaminated and is systematically destroyed for saying so. It opens Tuesday and runs for one week only.
He is not complaining about any of this. An Enemy of the People, he says, is basically a description of what is happening right now.
“It’s about small town politics, small town – I won’t say corruption – interlaced with personalities and how people shift depending on their economic circumstances,” he says. “It’s an extremely interesting play and of course very relevant to what we’re seeing in politics today in many ways.”
His most immediate local parallel is the All England Club’s campaign to expand its Wimbledon site with tens of thousands of new seats and dozens of additional courts, a story we have followed through the courts and Parliament.
“There is this campaign by the All England Club to – what is it – 38 tennis courts and an 8,000 seat stadium,” he says. “And we see very little in the way of compromise from what some people would view, what thousands would view, as a bullying organisation that is looking to their own commercial interests without taking account of what local people are looking for. That to me is the parallel.”
The doctor’s mistake
Ibsen’s play (in a 2019 adaptation by Rebecca Lenkiewicz that sets the action in 2026 and changes the protagonist from male to female) follows a doctor who finds the local water supply is contaminated and expects the town to thank her. The town does not thank her. The mayor, who is her brother, has economic reasons to suppress the finding. The local newspaper first backs her, then caves. The public meeting at which she attempts to present her evidence ends with the crowd voting to declare her an enemy of the people.
William’s reading of the play is not simply that truth-tellers get crushed. He finds something more interesting: that the doctor’s method undermines her cause.
“The doctor, the protagonist, has worked very hard to uncover something very important, very real,” he says. “And they plan to put it right – and what should be done. And as many campaigners are, rather uncompromising in the way that they do it and economically as well as in personality end up alienating large numbers of the population – and then there’s a sort of cabal of officialdom that wants to shut it down.”
The lesson, in his view: “If you want to make a change, you have to lay the ground for that change. You have to build the infrastructure, you’ve got to bring people with you, not just hit them with a stick. Everywhere today we see that: decisions taken whether it’s by central government, local government.”
He pauses, then compresses the whole argument into five words. “Things that are brittle snap.”
Research method
William plays a minor character. He has approached the role with what you might call field research.
“I’m the Polish drunk,” he sums up. “I’ve been listening to my Polish builder, very carefully.”
This is, it turns out, one of the things acting does to you. You start watching people differently. The builder becomes source material. The neighbour at the bar becomes a character study. Thirty years of observing tenants, tradespeople, and local politics suddenly has a second purpose.
The character is also the play’s structural signal that the doctor has lost everyone. The Town Drunk is the town’s most marginal figure, its least powerful voice. When even he turns against you, Ibsen is telling you something precise: you have failed to carry a single person.
His is also a practical role in the production: alongside his acting debut, William is volunteering with stage management and has been helping the company make the on-stage newsroom look authentic. He worked at the South London Press as a cub reporter in an era when the finished paper would appear on your desk still smelling of wet ink.
“I worked at the South London Press as a cub reporter. You get these fresh newspapers put on your desk and the smell of wet ink is something that’s so evocative. It’s one of these things that takes me back 30 years.”
In the play, the local newspaper starts as the doctor’s ally, then withdraws under pressure. He is helping a drama group recreate a world he inhabited, watching a fictional version of it make the same choices he saw real newspapers make.
The group
Carlton Theatre Group was founded in 1927 by enthusiasts from Wimbledon Park and Southfields, which makes this production a local story in more than one sense. The group is Wimbledon’s longest-established non-professional theatre company, still performing nearly a century on. It runs three productions a year at its home venue, the Studio at New Wimbledon Theatre. Its current president is David Wood OBE; its former president was Dame June Whitfield.
Amateur theatre in the UK is larger than most people realise. There are more than 2,500 groups nationally, producing around 30,000 performances a year. The NODA 2002 survey found 437,800 participants and 7.3 million audience attendances. Most of it happens in rooms you have to find your own way into.
“My last performance was a school play – and um, sort of several decades later, I thought, yeah, let’s try this again shall we?”
The play they have chosen is, of course, a Norwegian one. A group of Wimbledon enthusiasts, performing a 130-year-old work by a playwright from Bergen, about a community that puts its own interests ahead of an inconvenient truth. Director Terry Oakes has a line for this. “In our case,” he says, “it’s not Britain First — but Norway First.”
Tickets and times
An Enemy of the People runs at the Studio at New Wimbledon Theatre, 93 The Broadway, Wimbledon SW19 1QG, from Tuesday 12 May to Saturday 16 May 2026. Evening performances at 19:45, Tuesday to Saturday, with a Saturday matinee at 15:00. Tickets are £17.60 full price and £15.40 for concessions.
The play is 130 years old, has a cast of 11, and feels like it was written last week. Book at atgtickets.com.
Correction: We initially named the character being played by William as Morten Kiil. This is not correct. We have corrected the story to reflect this.
