About the play

The Life of Galileo had a long gestation. Bertolt Brecht worked on different versions of the play over a period of twenty years. The first was completed in Germany in November 1938, at a time when Hitler and the Nazi party were preparing to precipitate a devastating world war. The play was never staged. As the political situation deteriorated and war became inevitable, Brecht sought to leave Germany. He travelled first to Denmark and it was here that he revised Galileo, the play he initially called The Earth Moves. Again, there was no production of it.

Following the outbreak of war in 1939, Brecht eventually moved to the United States in 1941. There, in Los Angeles, he was involved in discussions about a possible film of his play but this came to nothing. In September 1943, at the height of World War 2, Galileo was given its world premiere in Zurich, a city in neutral Switzerland. We don’t know whether Brecht knew much or indeed anything about this production, let alone the response of the people who saw it. But we do know that Brecht’s interest in a stage version of the play was revived the following year.

In LA in the 1940s he met the English-born film actor, Charles Laughton, who had read Galileo and thought it an ideal vehicle for him to reinvigorate his stalled stage career. Laughton commissioned a new translation which, with Brecht’s apparent approval, became the third version of the play now titled Life of the Physicist Galileo. Brecht and Laughton subsequently worked very closely and by all accounts happily, on developing the first American version. It finally reached the New York stage, with Laughton playing Galileo, in July 1947. It was not a critical success but Brecht was pleased with it.

In 1947 Brecht returned to post-war Germany and settled in what had become a partitioned country. Its former capital, Berlin, was now a divided city, and Brecht chose to live and work in Communist-controlled East Berlin. There, in 1953, he once more began work (with his collaborators) translating and revising the ‘American’ version of Galileo. In 1955 it was given its first public performance not in the East, but in West Germany, in Cologne. Brecht was working on a new production of the play destined to be performed in East Berlin by his own company, the Berliner Ensemble, when, in 1956, he died.