Brecht without bombast

The Life of Galileo

BAC, SW11

SITTING through Brecht can be a bit like eating cabbage - you know it's good for you but it's rather hard work. All those preachy didactics as he biffs you about the head with his ideas.

The Life of Galileo, which Brecht wrote and rewrote with endless collaborators over 18 years until he died, is certainly chockfull of ideas: man's place in the universe, religion, betrayal, the role of the scientist and the consequences of his discoveries. Thankfully, director David Salter has gone for David Hare's lively and literate version - first premiered at the Almeida in 1994 - which, to a large extent, takes the bombast out of Brecht.

While that original production rejoiced in an Italianate glow and joie de vivre, Salter's production is a darker, more claustrophobic affair. As Galileo's heretical theories, based on Copernicus's, that the Earth revolves around the Sun, come into conflict with the Church and the Inquisition, sinister cardinals appear in shards of light.

At times it almost looks like a Jacobean tragedy. This is an appropriate vision, given the main theme of oppression and the Church's self-interest in maintaining the status quo, its hypocrisy masked by assertions that Galileo's corrupting, heliocentric ideas deny the existence of God.

Brecht, typically, gives us a man who battles against authority, a visionary ahead of his time thwarted by the ignorant powers-that-be, but he's a flawed antihero.

Ted van Griethuysen recognises this in a performance that makes the most of Galileo's lack of humility and irreverence, his dry irony and disregard for his supporters. (Yes, everything revolves around him.) He is also, though, a man of the people, one for the pleasures of the senses; this side of the man, and his sheer passion, van Griethuysen's sporadically unsure portrayal doesn't quite achieve.

On Julie Marabelle's set, which glows with the moon's surface and uses inset scenes that look like old paintings, Salter's production has blasts of energy. It may occasionally come across as just workmanlike, but it leaves one with the right sense of betrayal and a genius diminished.

Universal stuff, indeed.

_ Until 25 August. Box office: 020 7223 2223.

Copyright 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.