Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (3 page)

Briefly Brecht hoped that he and Losey might be able to stage a try-out at Berkeley under the auspices of Henry Schnitzler, son of the Austrian playwright, but time was too short. Instead the three partners decided to turn to a new smaller management headed by Norman Lloyd and John Houseman, who were then about to take over the Coronet Theatre on La Ciénega Boulevard, Los Angeles. They agreed to put on
Galileo
as their second production, with the ‘extremely decent’ (said Brecht) T. Edward Hambleton as its principal backer. Though Brecht was unable to get his old collaborator Caspar Neher over from Europe as he wished, the substitute designer Robert Davison accepted his and Laughton’s ideas for an unmonumental, non-naturalistic setting; Helene Weigel helped with the costumes. Eisler (who actually preferred the first version of the play) wrote the music in a fortnight; Lotte Goslar did the choreography. Rehearsals were scheduled to start at the end of May 1947, when Laughton would have
finished a film; the opening would be on 1 July. Though this had to be put off till the last day of the month everything otherwise seems – amazingly enough – to have gone according to plan. Losey not only justified Reyher’s recommendation of him –

He knows casting, has the feel for it; he knows what to do with actors; he can get a crowd sense without numbers, and movement that isn’t just confusion, and keep the whole of a play in mind.

– but worked so closely with Brecht that the latter ever afterwards treated the production as his own. Laughton, exceptionally nervous before the première, resisted any temptation to overact, and concentrated on bringing out the contradictory elements with which they had enriched Galileo’s character; the one point that still resisted him, according to Brecht, being the logic of the deep self-abasement manifested in his ‘Welcome to the gutter’ speech near the end of the play. Not that such refinements would have been particularly appreciated by the critics, for both
Variety
and the
New York Times
complained that the production was too flat and colourless. Charlie Chaplin too – who never really knew what to make of Brecht – sat next to Eisler at the opening and dined with him afterwards; he found that the play was not theatrical enough and said it should have been mounted differently. ‘When I told him’, said Eisler later,

that Brecht never wants to ‘mount’ things, he simply couldn’t understand.

To Helia Wuolijoki in Finland Losey would write after the New York production that

working with Brecht has spoilt me for any other kind of theatre …

And from then on he was lost to the cinema. For Brecht himself however it was certainly the most important and satisfying theatrical occasion since he first went into exile in 1933:

The stage and the production were strongly reminiscent of the Schiffbauerdamm Theatre in Berlin; likewise the intellectual part of the audience.

So he wrote to Reyher (Letter 543). Whether or not it played to such full houses as he later claimed, the whole achievement was an astonishing tribute to the actor’s courage, the director’s commitment and the writer’s relentless perfectionism: one of the great events in Brecht’s life.

* * *

In the long struggle to stage the ‘American’ version it might seem that Brecht hardly noticed that the Second World War was over. Thus his poem to Laughton ‘concerning the work on the play
The Life of Galileo’ (Poems 1913–1956
, p. 405):

Still your people and mine were tearing each other to pieces when we

Pored over those tattered exercise books, looking

Up words in dictionaries, and time after time

Crossed out our texts and then

Under the crossings-out excavated

The original turns of phrase. Bit by bit –

While the housefronts crashed down in our capitals –

The façades of language gave way. Between us

We began following what characters and actions dictated:

New text.

Again and again I turned actor, demonstrating

A character’s gestures and tone of voice, and you

Turned writer. Yet neither I nor you

Stepped outside his profession.

In fact however he had begun to prepare his return to Germany as early as 1944 (when the FBI reported him visiting the Czech consulate for the purpose), and in December 1945 he wrote in his journal, ‘maybe I’ll no longer be here, next autumn’. The
Galileo
discussions apart, this was the beginning of a curiously blank year in Brecht’s biography (see
Journals
, editorial note to
5 January 1946), by the end of which he had had some kind of invitation to work in the Soviet sector of Berlin, once again at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. Early in 1947 he was trying to organise a common front with Piscator and Friedrich Wolf (who was already back there) with a view to rehabilitating the Berlin theatre; by March he and Weigel had got their papers to go to Switzerland. The machinations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (from May onwards) thus had less effect on his movements than is sometimes thought. Hanns Eisler was interrogated by one of their subcommittees that month and the FBI file on Brecht reopened, while Eisler’s brother Gerhart was on trial during much of the
Galileo
rehearsals; finally Brecht himself appeared before the committee a day or two before leaving for Switzerland in September. But these words did probably affect the fortunes of the New York production, which Hambleton had delayed (according to Higham) in order to add the ‘passion, excitement, colour’ which the critics had felt to be lacking. Further cuts were made there to give us the text as we now print it (see the appendix, p. 3 3 3 ff.), the odd facetious line was worked in; the cast was entirely new. Again however the reviews were bad, Brooks Atkinson in the
New York Times
dismissing the production as ‘stuffed with hokum’. ‘The New York press’, noted Brecht in Zurich,

seems to have missed exactly what laughton’s catholic friend missed in
GALILEO
: a scientist agonising under duress whom we can empathise with, well, galileo’s bad conscience is shown in right proportion in the play, but this is not nearly enough for the bourgeoisie; having come to power it wishes to see the higher spiritual movements of those whom it compels to act against their consciences displayed larger than life so as to embellish the overall picture of their world.

The run was a very short one – six performances, suggests the 1988 edition. Higham blames the difficulty of finding another theatre to which to transfer. But Laughton’s earlier biographer Kurt Singer gave a somewhat different interpretation, writing
(with an exaggeration indicative of the temper of those times) that

The trouble lay in the political affiliations of the playwright. Berthold Brecht was a dyed-in-the-wool Communist. On the point of being deported from the United States for his Communist activities, he escaped and turned up again in East Germany, where be became the Soviet’s pet author, supervising the literary life of the Soviet-controlled zone and turning out odes to Stalin on the various state holidays. The musical score for the play on Galileo had been composed by Hanns Eisler, another convinced Communist who had composed many propaganda songs, including
The Comintern March
. Several actors in the cast turned out to be Communists too …

Whether or not this put Laughton himself off the play, as Singer suggests, Brecht continued to count on the actor’s collaboration in a proposed film version to be made in Italy. The producer who had initiated this scheme was Rod E. Geiger, who apparently had funds in that country as a result of his earnings on Rossellini’s
Open City
. Negotiations continued while Brecht was in Switzerland, and a scheme was worked out with the approval of Laughton and his agents by which the former would come to London for a production of the play around the end of 1948, after which work on the film would follow. Brecht and Reyher would write the script, which Geiger felt must give more emphasis to the relationship between Virginia and her fiance Ludovico. However, everything was conditional on Laughton’s involvement, and he blew hot and cold, his own nervousness of Communist associations being no doubt aggravated by the warnings of his agent. So it all fell through – possibly prompting Brecht to the satirical Obituary for Ch.L’ which he wrote around this time (
Poems 1913–1956
, p. 418):

Speak of the weather

Be thankful he’s dead

Who before he had spoken

Took back what he said.

At any rate this put paid for the moment to all further plans, since the play could hardly be staged by Brecht’s own company, the Berliner Ensemble, till they had a suitable actor and a revised German text. Brecht himself in Zurich had made a start and translated about half the Laughton text; he seems to have discussed a Berlin production outside the programme of that company, with Kortner or Steckel in the title part. Then in 1953 he set his collaborators (Hauptmann, Besson, Berlau) to work translating and expanding the ‘American’ version so as to include certain elements of that of 1938, notably the plague scenes and the great introductory speech about the ‘new time’ in scene 1. He then went over the results himself, also adding German versions of the ballad, the poems and the inter-scene verses. In 1955 all this but for the verses was given its premiere in Cologne in West Germany, after which he at last – in the final year of his life – began preparing to stage the play with the Berliner Ensemble.

In ten years a lot had changed. The text had grown longer by half, the production envisaged (with Neher as designer) was more lavish, there was no actor of Laughton’s calibre available. Brecht himself was to direct it, but he could only conduct rehearsals from mid-December up to the end of March 1956 when he became too ill to go on. As Galileo he cast his old Communist friend Ernst Busch, who had been in
The Mother, Kuhle Wampe
and the
Threepenny Opera
film before 1933, had sung Brecht—Eisler songs to the troops in Spain, been interned by the French, then handed over to the Gestapo and wounded in the bombing of Berlin. Since returning to the German stage Busch had tended to specialise in cunning or lovable rogues: Mephisto and lago for the Deutsches Theater, Azdak and the Cook (in
Mother Courage
) for Brecht. A much less intellectual actor than Laughton, he found it even more difficult to alienate the audience’s sympathies at the end of the play; and when Erich Engel took over the production after Brecht’s death he was allowed to present the handing-over of
the
Discorsi
as a piece of justified foxiness which made his recantation ultimately forgiveable. Brecht himself had underlined two points in connection with this production: the first, his view that the recantation was an absolute crime (see p. 205), the second, that Galileo’s line in scene 9 ‘My object is not to establish that I was right but to find out if I am’ is the most important sentence in the play. Others have stressed that the new version followed the manufacture and testing of the hydrogen bomb, so that the social responsibility of the scientist became a particularly topical theme. It is difficult however to see this play as a member of an East European audience without feeling that it is above all about scientific enquiry and the human reason. For the parallels are too clear: the Catholic Church is the Communist Party, Aristotle is Marxism—Leninism with its incontrovertible scriptures, the late ‘reactionary’ pope is Joseph Stalin, the Inquisition the KGB. Obviously Brecht did not write it to mean this, and if he had seen how the local context prompted this interpretation he might have been less keen for the production to go on. But as things turned out it proved to be among the most successful of all his plays in the Communist world.

* * *

In our view
Galileo
is Brecht’s greatest play, and it is worth tracing its long and involved history in order to understand why. Not just one, but three crucial moments of our recent history helped to give it its multiple relevance to our time: Hitler’s triumphs in 1938, the dropping of the first nuclear bomb in 1945, the death of Stalin in 1953. Each found Brecht writing or rewriting his play. And on each occasion the conditions of work were different: thus it was first written in his measured, stylish yet utterly down-to-earth German, then re-thought in English for Anglo-Saxon tongues and ears, then put back into German so as to combine the strengths of both. At none of these three stages was its form in any way mannered or gimmicky: sprawl as it might, particularly in the two German versions, it was outwardly a straightforward chronicle of seventeenth-century intellectual history, sticking surprisingly
closely to the known facts. This was not ‘opportunist’ as Brecht at one moment termed it, even if it did represent a reaction against the conventionally realistic small-scale forms which he had used in 1937. Undoubtedly however his new approach made for accessibility, and as a result almost any competent and unpretentious production of the play will grab the audience’s attention and get the meaning across.

What is that meaning? In fact there are several that can be read into the play, nor is this surprising when you think that Brecht’s active concern with it covered nearly twenty years. So the problem for the modern director is to sift out those that matter from those that don’t. First of all, this is not only a hymn to reason, but one that centres specifically on the need to be sceptical, to doubt. The theme is one that recurs more briefly in others of Brecht’s writings of the later 1930s – for instance the poems ‘The Doubter’ and ‘In Praise of Doubt’ and the ‘On Doubt’ section of the as yet untranslated
Me-Ti
– and it very clearly conflicts with the kind of ‘positive’ thinking called for by both Nazis and the more rigid-minded of the Communists, which must not be critical (’negative’) but optimistic. This notion of Brecht’s that doubt and even self-doubt can be highly productive – that ‘disbelief can move mountains’, as he later put it in the
Short Organum
– is deeply engrained in the play; and although it ties in with his doctrine of ‘alienation’ or the need to take nothing for granted it also surely represents a reaction against the orthodox Socialist Realist view. How far it can be attributed to the historical Galileo is another matter. As Eric Bentley and, more recently, Paul Feierabend have pointed out, Galileo’s reliance on the evidence of his senses was largely limited to the observations which he made with the telescope; elsewhere he was more speculative and less rational than Brecht suggests. What is true however is the conflict between authority and free scientific enquiry, both on the institutional level and within Galileo’s own character (for he was indeed a believing Catholic). If anything, the former’s position is presented too reasonably, both Barberini and the Inquisitor having in fact behaved much worse than Brecht let them do.