Galileo shook Europe to its foundations in the early 17th century, when he put forward the non-debatable fact that the universe was heliocentric - that the Earth and its planets revolved around the Sun, not the other way round.
It was not exactly new, since Copernicus had proposed a similar theory some years before, something Galileo adopted and extended.
The Catholic Church went into shock, since for centuries it had preached the Ptolemaic, geocentric theory, which fitted in neatly with biblical teachings and was therefore vade mecum for the faithful under its control. There were screams of heresy and threats of eternal damnation.
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Brecht’s way of dealing with this theme was to satirise and extend this revolutionary social conflict using agit-prop tools which included knockabout comedy, laughter and a certain German earthiness, things which distanced the audience from involvement with the protagonists set before them.
As in this production, a new translation of Brecht’s work by Mark Ravenhill, which comes to the Rep from the RSC and is directed skillfully by Roxana Silbert, who has clearly taken to Brechtian resources with open arms, Brechtian tricks are everywhere from onstage handmikes to surtitles over the stage.
Here the anti-realists are flattered with a set made from stylised blue graph paper with bits of red step ladders and hand mikes around the stage, and throughout the evening emotion is underplayed in a search for truth.
Half way through the evening, a carnival sequence is introduced, with feathers, masks and theatrical drum-banging. It wakes you up in case you might have felt a wee bit drowsy and fits in neatly with Brechtian theory.
The reason is that the Cathlolic Church has finally woken up to the toxic fact that the established order of things is under threat and he power of the church is suddenly faced with revolution. Oddly enough, Galileo’s theories were not removed from the Index until 1992, when the Vatican admitted it had been in error.
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In this fast-moving evening, it is the occasional gravity of the situation which slows down Ms Silbert’s directorial excess for a moment and thus there are several quietly telling scenes of admirable simplicity, where Brecht’s wearisome send-up style stops for a moment and we get a clear dramatic picture of this heroic man being hauled away by the Inquisition to “be shown the instruments”.
Obviously, faced with having his body torn apart, Galileo recants but there is an illuminating twist at the end which recalls how Jews in the death camps fought back cunningly against their Nazi jailers.
Ian McDiarmid brings both depth and compassion and a sense of Galileo’s sense of moral responsibility to a rich portrayal of a genius despairing at the lethal reaction by his fellow men to obvious scientific truth.
But the production is rich with strong performances from Chris Lew Kum Hoi’s tender young monk who sympathises with Galileo’s quandary to Patrick Romer’s chilly Cardinal Inquisitor.
Runs until March 8