A Life of Galileo
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 26th February 2013
Good theatre is good theatre; good, affordable theatre is a cultural and social victory and I am victorious on your behalf. It is not just a pre-occupation with parsimony that makes me consider the cost of theatre tickets in this blog, it is the belief, shared by Ms Wertenbaker (see previous) that we will all be redeemed by theatre and therefore I will scour the earth for affordable theatre tickets so that the masses may benefit and then I will tell you about it. You may not want to know, you may not want to go but I can but try and win you over with my words. Listen, to simplify, there’s a lot of crap on TV but we all pay our license fee. Stop paying it, throw out the TV and stand in the cheap seats!
So I stumbled across £5 tickets to the Brecht. Hurrah! The catch, if you can call it a catch, was that it would be an understudy performance. Sometimes an idea shines with such brilliance that it lights the way and this seemed to me to be just such an idea; an idea where everybody wins. The actors get a rare chance to take centre stage and show off their mettle, the audience gets cheap tickets and the powers-that-be get a full house. I wonder if this happens often? I’ve never heard of it before but the old people must be in the loop because the revolution at present seems to be restricted to the pensionable section of society; the Swan was crammed to the galleries with the older theatre-goer. Perhaps, you may say, it is because they are the only people who can attend a matinee performance. But then, £5 tickets! Take a sickie, pull the kids out of school for the afternoon, make theatre the priority!
I took my pensionable mother because everyone else was busy. She hoped that there would be pretty scenery and authentic costumes. I questioned her on what exactly people wore in sixteenth century Padua, she didn’t know exactly. Then a very young woman came onto the stage, the assistant director, keen to have a go. She explained that this would be live theatre (thank goodness!), some characters would be playing more than one part (revolutionary!) and seemed, other than having her fifteen minutes, to be apologising before the performance had even begun. It whetted the appetite but really, she needn’t have fretted, what ensued was a delight and highly accomplished and professional.
At the beginning of each scene electrical displays dangled from the ceiling stating in lights the date and location. These were difficult to read and a bit of an irrelevance but caused a a stir at first. Paul Hamilton played Galileo Galilei and he embodied the role instantly, stripping to the waist and washing himself on stage so that the audience understands that this is the man; the body of the man who will be pivotal to the world of science forever; he is real. Brecht wanted Galileo to be real. He wanted him to be fallible, to have impulses of the flesh but not, I think, for the old reason of having the audience relate but more because he seems to want us to avoid judging the character; not to hold him responsible. Hamilton is never quite larger than life but he is still the anti-hero of the play around whom the other characters orbit.
Unfortunately the costumes were, as I tried to explain, representative. Loosely twentieth century, characters wore a uniform that represented their status and occupation. Andrea as a boy wears shorts and bobble hat, Galileo wears the scruffy shirt and shorts of an aging bon viveur, the dignitaries of Rome wear ceremonial robes much like they have always worn, Mrs Sarti wore an apron to denote her status as housekeeper. When Andrea returns in the last scene as a grown man to take the secret manuscript out of the country for publication he wears the mac of the spy. This is very effective because we are reminded of the times that surrounded the writing of the play. Brecht had fled Nazi Germany and the Gestapo would seem a fitting influence for the Inquisition in the play. In this way, the play feels very modern.
It was commissioned this season because the RSC wanted to explore what was happening in other parts of the world around the time our own Bard was writing his play. Galileo and Shakespeare were born weeks apart. This gives our interpretation of the play a level of confusion. Galileo and Shakespeare may have been contemporaries but Brecht was writing in the twentieth century. Brecht’s motivation was not to give an accurate, biographical account of Galileo’s life but to represent ‘a twentieth century perspective on the conflict between religious dogmatism and scientific evidence’, so says the programme. This is the play’s great strength. The moment of climax comes after his recanting of his beliefs when Galileo shouts in response to Andrea’s cry of, ‘Unhappy the land that has no heroes!’ with, ‘No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.’ This is a philosophy that will travel and is as relevant now as ever.
However, this performance seemed to take representation too far. The vaudevillian theme that began a lot of the scenes; masked dancers, big band music, seemed to suppress any sort of emotional resonance that the play could have had. Unfortunately it was a little dry. Virginia played by Joan Iyiola never seemed completely plausible as his daughter. Her devotion seemed to spring from religious fervour rather than daughterly love and Galileo’s flippant treatment of her and of every one he encountered made him seem at odds with the life-loving man of the flesh. Instead there was a hint of the autistic to all the relationships.
Mrs Sarti, played by Nia Gwynne was a Welsh Harpy with a comical turn of phrase and hand-on-hip exasperation. Susan Momoko Hingley as the Bursar was comical because of her small stature. Dressed in black trouser suit there was something of Charlie Chaplin about her as she tried to rein in the maverick Galileo. But these attempts at humour did not manage to humanise the relationships.
But that is not to detract from how well my interest was held throughout. At the end the actors’ smiles were triumphant with much back-slapping and hugging, you could sense their relief at their achievement. The atmosphere in the theatre was one of generous good-humour, as if we were all part of some sort of revolutionary experiment together.
