Marshall Cohen
THEATER 67
John Hirsch's production of
Galileo,
adorned with music
in
the style of Gabrieli, and gushing about the romance of the heavens
like a Hayden Planeterium lecture, is largely the piece of historical
ham with a star part that Brecht warned against. Anthony Quayle,
wonderfully articulate from the neck up, plays the Galileo of history
and legend. Hirsch presses on to the realms of tragic poetry, posing
Galileo with his faithful daughter, like the blind Oedipus or the afflicted
Lear. Brecht
is
not uninterested in the paradox of the blind seer (how
could he be with a socially regressive astronomer as his subject?), but
the
Theses on Feuerbach
provides his text: the point is not to under–
stand the world, but to change it.
The Galileo of history was a Christian gentleman, a social conserva–
tive and a natural philosopher; the Galileo of the play is closer to
Brecht himself-an atheist, a IX>litical revolutionary, even a modern
"scientist." The technique of "alienation," Brecht's main contribution
to an esthetic for the scientific age, provides the same experience
as looking through Galileo's telescope: the familiar is seen in an un–
familiar light. In consequence, a critical audience will reject the
im–
plications of the Aristotelian theater as the scientific community rejects
the assumptions of the Aristotelian world. Galileo makes this point to
his disciple Andrea-and well within earshot of the audience: gawking
is not seeing.
Brecht's relation to Galileo is personal, as well as theoretical; he
reads his own dilemmas, and the dilemmas of his generation, into and
back out of at least three different versions of the play.
If
Galileo co–
operated with the Inquisition and lived to finish his
Discorsi,
Brecht was
praised by the House Un-American Activities Committee and went
on to found the Berliner Ensemble.
If
Galileo abandoned the impecuni–
ous freedom of Venice for ease at the Medici court, Brecht rejected ob–
scurity in Hollywood for the subsidies of East Berlin. In the first version
