The script was created by the ensemble of actors through a process of structured improvisations based on the first English translation of the play by Eleanor Marx Aveling. These improvisations were shaped in the rehearsal room––a form of collective, embodied playwriting––and then transcribed by Margaret Smith and Anthony Courant, edited by Margaret, and further developed in the rehearsal room. 

In Act 4, Dr. Stockmann quotes a line from The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, a text that served as an early and important reference point for the play’s conceptual development: “What do an American barn owl, a Zimbabwean hippopotamus, and a Norwegian reindeer have in common? What they have in common is that they all have a relationship with your body – they are all, in some sense, your responsibility...Even the patient who is anesthetized on an operating table, barely breathing, is illuminated by surgeons lamps which are powered with electricity trailed from a plant which is pumping out of its chimneys a white smoke that spreads itself out against the sky. Does this have anything at all to do with you? Is there any connection there?”