Although I’ve some doubt — and this would be applauded by Galileo — whether in everyday life it matters very much to know whether the sun goes round the earth or vice versa, I don’t for one minute doubt that the great physicist’s conflict with Mother Church mattered profoundly and resonates to this day.
To Brecht, writing Das Leben des Galilei in exile in 1938, shortly after the disastrous Chamberlain appeasement, his play asserted unprejudiced scientific inquiry not just against religious dogma but also the controls that fascism and profiteering have ever sought to impose upon it. He gets to this issue way ahead of Michael Frayn’s treatment in Copenhagen of the 1941 debate between Werner Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. There’s a nice cross-connection in that Brecht wrote his play in Denmark and had the physics sorted out for him by Bohr’s associates.
There’s further food for thought at Stratford in that Galileo and Shakespeare were both born in 1564, though my jury’s out on whether the Italian’s advocacy of Copernican cosmology was known to Shakespeare or reflected in any of his plays.
Roxana Silbert’s staging of A Life of Galileo (English version by Mark Ravenhill) sees the return to Stratford of Ian McDiarmid in the immensely demanding title role, one on which the likes of Charles Laughton and Michael Gambon have left their mark.
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