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God, Church and universal truth 
And still it moves . . . Ian McDiarmid (Galileo)
watches on as Paul Westwood (Ludovico) A Life of Galileo
Birmingham Rep
**** GALILEO Galilei was a heretic, perhaps
the best know heretic of his day, for daring to suggest that the earth
was not the centre of the universe, and had he not been quite so famous
a scientist by the time he started to prove his theories, it was a
heresy that might well have cost him his life. His heresy though was not against God, but
against the Holy Catholic Church and its teachings. Not only had he
started to publish his works in Italian, the language of the market
place and fishmonger, instead of the more exclusive Latin, dangerously
opening up knowledge to the masses, the peasants and farm workers, but
he was challenging the Church’s teachings on the structure and form of
God’s universe. To the all-powerful Papal hierarchy in Rome, the
Florentine scientist was challenging the authority of the very Church.
If the Church were to be seen as wrong on the universe, shown to be
fallible on one thing, then people, even p That is the crux of Bertolt Brecht’s play, which
was originally written just before the outbreak of the Second World War
with a second version written, in collaboration with Charles Laughton
incidentally, produced just after the war. Laughton was to play Galileo in the premiere of
the American version in Los Angeles in 1947, a production directed by
Joseph Losey. It all sounds a bit dry and intense, religion v
science with Brecht’s Marxist view of the world colouring everything but
in this new translation by Mark Ravenhill we have a play which is
exciting, entertaining, informative – although Galileo was actually
wrong on tides and falling bodies – and even moving at the end. Above
all it manages to be both thought provoking and fun.
Ravenhill says in the programme notes the
Brecht’s plays are full of humour, there may be a message but “there’s
always irony, always a twinkle and in many ways he is a comic writer.” And in Ian McDiarmid we have a Galileo with a
permanent twinkle in his eye, a university teacher, scientist and
father. This is a towering performance by McDiarmid as the scientific
revolutionary who was, eventually, to change the thinking of the world,
a man who put science and knowledge above all else, who, in Brecht’s
eyes, saw science as being of benefit to mankind not just the province
of those selling discoveries for profit. We delight in his delight at seeing new
discoveries in the heavens with the telescope he claims, in the play, to
have invented, yet in truth only improved. It is the delight and
wonder, that explosion of the senses of a small child upon seeing the
wonders of the world for the first time. Galileo was a giant, still seen as the father of
modern science, but here we see he is also human, and the threat of pain
from torture by the Inquisition is enough to see him recant his heresy
and live out his life withdrawn from the world under strictly controlled
house arrest. The rebel is still there under the surface though
and he secretly smuggles out his greatest and most influential work
Discorsi, or Two New Sciences, finally published in Holland
in 1638, which summarised his work over 40 years. The final defiance of
the Papal ban. Matthew Albery gives fine support as Andrea, the son of his landlady, sporting a fine Welsh accent as first a pupil then an assistant to Galileo. What a Welshman was doing in 17th century Italy is a mystery although in Pisa, Galileo’s birthplace I did come across a petrol station owned by two Welshmen who had Italian wives, so the unlikely can be possible. You feel Andrea’s deep sense of betrayal when
Galileo decides discretion is preferable to torture and perhaps death
and so recants. For his daughter, the plain Virginia, played by
Katherine Manners with all the despair and disappointment of a daughter
always coming second fiddle to science, the recantation was salvation. Her role and her chance of marriage dashed as a
result of her father’s defiance of the Church is a Brecht dramatic
invention though
He keeps largely to historical record, with surtitles above the stage giving events in Galileo’s life and the year they happened, but in reality Virginia, who, like his other daughter and son, was illegitimate. With such a social stigma she was seen as
unmarriageable and so was sent by her father to a convent at 13, her
only option for a respectable life, and there she remained. In the play though she is desperate for the
safely of her father, despite her own loss, and to her the recantation
gives him a chance of life. But what life. The new, Rome sanctioned version
of Galileo is a broken man, he has aged overnight, become an old man –
but there is still that twinkle as he reveals the manuscript of his
Discorsi to Andrea. There is also good support from Sadie Shimmin as
his landlady Mrs Sarti, Patrick Romer as the Cardinal Inquisitor, Chris
Lew Kum Hoi as Cosimo De Medici and Jo Servi as Antonio Barberini, the
Florentine nobleman who was to become Pope Urban VIII, and who protected
Galileo from the worst excesses of the inquisition. Director Roxana Silbert keeps the action moving
along at a cracking pace, helped by Tom Scutt’s flexible set of three
backcloths and a collection of mobile safety steps of various heights of
the sort seen in warehouses. These provide thrones, platforms, church candle
holders and even an opening bath room. Dress is largely modern and
visually this is a satisfying production with the instant scene changes
by the cast providing interest as to what is to come next rather than an
interruption to the flow. Ravenhill has streamlined the script, keeping in
the essence rather than allowing Brecht’s sometimes self-indulgent
tendency for preaching to flourish, although as always with Brecht there
are resonances with what happened in the early 1600s having its echoes
today with religious myopia defying scientific fact, hence those who
believe the bible is a documentary account, that the world was created
in seven days, that creationism should be taught as scientific fact. There is also the howling down of anyone defying
authorty, these days Government
Galileo eventually realises that truth can be a dangerous thing when it challenges to dogma of the all-powerful Church If there is a weak point it is perhaps the songs
and doggerel with the full cast which opens Act II which is not helped
by the Rep’s less than perfect acoustics but even so seems a little out
of place which brings us, in a roundabout way, to the excellent off
stage band with incidental music under musical director Candida Caldicot. But this RSC production, in association with
Theatre Royal Bath Production, can hardly be judged on one incidental
scene, led by McDiarmid, this is a memorable and at times fun
interpretation of Brecht and even the scientific arguments are
interesting with its two and a half hours seeming to whiz by Incidentally, one irony missed by Brecht is the
fact Galileo at first wanted to be a priest, to join the very Church
which was to be his nemesis, but, changing the course of history, was
persuaded to study for a medical degree at The University of Pisa by his
musician father. To 08-03-14. Roger Clarke
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easants,
might start to question the rest.
the
one being tortured or doing the dying, but Galileo’s capitulation still
hits him hard.
and
big business, on anything from GM crops and fracking to daring to
believe that global warming might not be solely down to man and CO2
production – where would that sort of thinking leave the lucrative
carbon credits trading market.