Review Life Of Galileo

A magnificent performance at the centre of a Brechtian universe brings a German classic into focus for Francis Beckett. 

Life of Galileo 
by Bertolt Brecht

On Different Planets
https://www.youngvic.org/

The Young Vic under artistic director David Lan encourages its directors to use its space in unexpected ways.

With Galileo, director Joe Wright and designer Lizzie Clachan have filled the centre circle, where you expect to see only actors, with some of the audience, seated on cushions. No doubt this has the incidental advantage of maximising the potential box office.

Galileo, a 17th century academic and scientist, passes off the telescope as his own invention in the Venetian Republic.  Yet with the telescope he then makes a true discovery which counters popular belief and sets him up in opposition to the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Much of the action of the play takes place on a narrow raised platform around the centre circle, and sometimes the actors thread their way through the members of the audience on the cushions.

They use this part of the audience as props, handing out pieces of paper which they retrieve a few minutes later. When an audience member sneezed, the actor speaking at the time added “Bless you.” to his lines  During the interval the 11-strong cast engage the people seated on cushions in conversation.

Some of the cast are also seated on the cushions. This is a modern dress production, so you don’t know who are audience members and who are actors until the actors stand up and speak. The entrances and exits are used for the occasional spectacular set piece.

Before the play begins, Brendan Cowell’s Galileo has to run and dance around the raised platform for quite a long time.  I am not sure it was wise of the director to make his leading actor do this: the night I saw it, Mr Cowell sounded a tiny bit breathless in his first few scenes.

Sometimes, even with the impressive planetarium-style design, projections by 59 Productions  and pulsing music by the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands,  I felt the director was getting carried away by clever gimmickry, but if you can’t experiment with that great theatrical innovator Bertolt Brecht, who can you experiment with?

And it does emphasise the relevance and immediacy of this most political of plays, translated by John Willet.

For Life of Galileo isn’t about Catholicism, though the Catholic Church comes out of it pretty badly. It isn’t, as some academics have suggested, a play about Marxism. It’s exactly what Joe Wright says it is: “At the heart of the play is a questioning of authority… It’s about power. It questions the way power maintains itself through prescribing an ideology and dogmatising an ideology.”

The great strength of Joe Wright's production is that everything he does emphasises that central idea, underlining that it’s as relevant now as it was at the time of the Inquisition or when it was written in 1938 and then revised in 1947. During those years  the Nazis were in power in Germany, Stalin’s terror in full swing in the USSR and then the nuclear bomb unleashed on Hiroshima.

Brendan Cowell is a magnificent Galileo. He offers us the selfish, self-assured, almost childish impatience of genius for much of the play, but at the moment the Inquisition comes for him, all the cockiness drops away. 

He is instantly diminished. It prepares us for the moment when he confesses that they did not torture him.  They only showed him the instruments of torture. That was enough for Galileo. It would certainly be enough for me.

A fine production of one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century is certainly worth a green light.

Review Cyprus Avenue

Cyprus Avenue

By David Ireland

The Orange And The Green

www.royalcourttheatre.com

There is a Buzzfeed meme making the rounds of the internet at the moment asking "What percentage Jeremy Corbyn are you?" Well, Eric Miller (Stephen Rea), the Protestant Loyalist protagonist of Cyprus Avenue would surely point indignantly at his grandchild as one hundred percent Gerry Adams.

Notwithstanding that she's a peach of a girl and barely five weeks' old and brought to the Miller's Cyprus Avenue household by daughter Julie (Amy Molloy).  

This tragicomedy, written by East Belfast playwright David Ireland and directed by Vicky Featherstone, tackles with black humour the entanglements of an older Belfast Protestant generation. 

Despite a dangerous, searing subject and the Gerry Adamification of the granddaughter, it almost falls into the category of a conventional psychiatric-consulting room based play, if it were not for two things. David Ireland's understanding of his home city and Stephen Rea's performance as he turns and considers the issues simmering in his mind before they boil over into violence.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves, for before that there are the  flashbacks  and  the psychiatrist Bridget (Wunmi Mosaku) to talk to. See what we mean about a conventional play?  

The title mirrors that of a Van Morrison song,  but Cyprus Avenue, where Eric lives with wife Bernie (Julie Dearden), is apparently also a leafy upmarket road, almost a Bishop's Avenue of Belfast (see Page 27 of link).

This seems at odds with the confused but strangely logical deductions  of Eric, which rightly or wrongly one associates with the working class,  as he repeats to himself why he is British. Yet it's not at odds with the strangeness of this play.  

It also occurred to us the playwright, without knowing if he is Catholic or Protestant, thankful his surname is a geographical fact rather than a partisan nationality, may have rehearsed the British/Irish arguments in his own mind for many years before writing this play!

It's a dangerous, edgy piece which plays around with conventions of playwriting as well as sectarianism. 

For all that, weaker points sometimes peep through.  A pivotal encounter with a Loyalist gunman Slim (Chris Corrigan) exposes the political language hiding harsh reality seeping more and more into the play as it progresses but uses mundane stand-up jokes less successfully.

And the slightest of niggles is that this would perhaps work even better as a movie where the psychiatrist's explanations of identity in a world context at the beginning of the play would feel less expositional. 

But the effective theatre-in-the-round plain white carpeted design  by Lizzie Clachan  with its few pieces of furniture almost works as a green special effects (no pun intended!) screen. The Protestant/Catholic divide is definitely Belfast but the trip to London brings in foreign exchange and hints of other eras.

The ending is not for the fainthearted but it's a play that knows it can't put a step wrong even if the characters are in the wrong. A green light for a disturbingly funny but tragic play.