This is a big role and it requires an actor of intelligence and stature to take it on successfully. At the National Theatre, the last actor to play the part was Michael Gambon in Howard Brenton’s version staged in 1981. Over twenty years later Simon Russell Beale plays the role and is on stage for practically the entire 3-hour run of the play. He has not only to articulate and respond to a complex series of arguments, but he also needs to change physically from being a bored, frustrated middle-aged scientist, to an old man, almost blind, who has betrayed his ideas. Simon Russell Beale experienced what he calls “great joy” in doing a play containing '
jewel-like mini-plays' and which raised so many issues that still fascinate and perplex us.
The longest scene in the play is the so-called sun spot scene (
see it in rehearsal ) in which Galileo conducts practical scientific experiments with his students (
which can't actually be reproduced in performance ). His future son-in-law, Ludovico, brings news that the next Pope is likely to be a mathematician and thus possibly more liberally inclined to tolerate the work that Galileo has been forbidden to pursue.
Simon Russell Beale talks about this scene from his character’s point of view .
Brecht not only wrote plays, he also wrote about how he wanted them to be performed. His theories of theatre have intrigued and frustrated students ever since. Simon Russell Beale agrees with the playwright Christopher Hampton that
Brecht was a better playwright than he was a theorist and confesses that he would be alarmed if the audience left the theatre unmoved at any level.
As the
introduction explains,
The Life of Galileo was written and almost continually revised by Brecht and his collaborators over a period of more than 20 years. For one of those collaborators, the actor Charles Laughton, who performed the part of Galileo in the first American production in 1947,
Brecht wrote a new speech following the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. In it he recognises the dangers as well as the opportunities represented by unfettered scientific research.
