A Life of Galileo, RSC

Brecht’s Life of Galileo sounds like a straight biographical account, but of course it’s a drama. The real history of Galileo is more interesting and complex than the attenuated cliché that has come down to us since, of the lonely, heroic scientist standing up to the might of the repressive, backward-looking Roman Catholic Church.

It was Cardinal Newman who pointed out that when ­people argued that the Catholic Church had always stood in the way of scientific advance, about the only example they could come up with was Galileo. Even this is a hazy memory. In 1610, Father Clavius wrote to tell Galileo that his fellow Jesuit astronomers had confirmed his observations. (The Jesuits were always at the forefront of astronomy, which is why there are 35 mountains and craters on the moon named after them.) Galileo was greeted rapturously in Rome the next year. In 1612 his work on sunspots received an enthusiastic letter of congratulation from Cardinal Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, and his Dialogue of 1632 was also written at the urging of the Pope.

These are all interesting details that indicate a more complex truth beneath the popular legend — but this A Life of Galileo, for its own reasons, sticks firmly with the legend. It’s not just about Galileo, it’s about Brecht’s passionate conviction that intellectuals must always resist tyranny and totalitarianism, no matter what the cost. That’s Bertolt Brecht, by the way, lifelong Marxist, winner of the Stalin Peace prize in 1954, who was furious with Einstein for suggesting that perhaps the Soviet Union ought not to have the atomic bomb.

Before the dawn of modernity and science, all is darkness. “Our cities are cramped, so are our minds,” Galileo tells us at the start. “Superstition, plague...” Then he makes a new telescope, looks up at the stars and sees that “heaven is empty”. Instantly he seems to become a 21st-century atheist. Ian McDiarmid communicates an invigorating sense of excitement at new discoveries and makes a genial, enthusiastic, sometimes peppery Galileo until the end, when, apparently having been cruelly tortured and broken by the Inquisition (historical note: he wasn’t), he comes shuffling on like Lear himself, white-haired, white-gowned, defeated, though still with a nice line in mordant irony against his oppressors.

There are some wildly over-the-top costumes, though Galileo is just a scruffy old boffin in a tweed suit. The young Cosimo de’ Medici appears in silver DMs and on a scooter, for no clear reason; three of Jupiter’s moons are dancers wearing silver discs in front of their faces, like something out of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The sinister Inquisitor is comic-book and there’s a ­hysterical old ­cardinal, who shrieks “Everything depends without question on me, God’s creation in the centre, the image of God, the eternal and...”, then collapses.

Just when you are beginning to think that, despite all McDiarmid’s amiability, everything here rather lacks subtlety and nuance, it gets a whole lot worse. Act II begins with a kind of diabolical carnival of celebration and revolt, with various figures leaping and cavorting about the stage, singing: “Who doesn’t want to be their own master?” Galileo is looking down a telescope and discovering that Jupiter has moons, you see. He has begun to unstitch the very fabric of hierarchical European society almost overnight. The oppressed proletariat are starting to liberate themselves from their chains and a new world is born. There’s a nun of the Sacred Heart in heavy make-up, a girning man in a white robe covered in crosses, another cross splatted across his face like an England supporter at the World Cup. Oh, and most daringly of all, Christ himself, crowned in thorns, in crucified pose, but looking utterly ridiculous in bright red Y-fronts!

Just to emphasise the RSC’s bravery and daring here, a minute later he is bouncing around the stage on a space ­hopper like an overgrown child. How insanely and courageously satirical to make mock of such a figure in a nation still so devoutly and indeed fiercely Christian! Yet if we were to ­suspect that the RSC wouldn’t dream of making mock of any other religious figure in this way, might it not suggest a rather pathetic and contemptible sort of cowardice?

This interlude only emphasises what a schematic play this is, made more so by Roxana ­Silbert’s direction and Mark Ravenhill’s translation. “Science good, church bad!” — we are ­hectored for two and a half loquacious hours. And I thought theatre was supposed to set up conflicts, represent different points of view, rather than try to hammer into the thick skulls of the groundlings its pre­decided opinions.