Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (39 page)

The Right to Submit

During the first sentences of his exchange with Sarti he listens inconspicuously for the footsteps of the Inquisition’s official in the anteroom, who stops every now and then, presumably in order to eavesdrop. Galileo’s inconspicuous listening is difficut to act since it must remain concealed from Sarti but not from the audience; concealed from Sarti because otherwise he would not take the prisoner’s repentant remarks at face value. But Galileo must convey them to him at face value so that his visitor can cash them when he reaches foreign parts; it would not do at all if it were rumoured abroad that the prisoner was recalcitrant. Then the conversation reaches a point where Galileo abandons this way of speaking for the benefit of hostile ears, and proclaims, authoritatively and forcefully, that it is his right to submit. Society’s command to its members to produce is but vague and accompanied by no manner of guarantee; a producer produces at his own risk; and Galileo can prove any time that being productive endangers his comfort.

Handing over the Book

L. made the disclosure about the existence of the
Discorsi
quickly and with exaggerated indifference; but in a way suggesting that the old man was only trying to get rid of the fruits of a regrettable lapse, with yet another implication beneath this: anxiety lest the visitor reject the imposition together with the risk involved in taking the book with him. As he was protesting ill-humouredly that he wrote the book only
as a slave of habit – the thoroughly vicious habit of thinking – the spectator could see that he was also listening. (Having made his eyesight worse by secretly copying the book which is endangered by the Inquisition, when he wants to gauge Sard’s reaction he is wholly dependent on his ears.) Toward the end of his appeal he virtually abandons his attitude of ‘condescending grandeur’ and comes close to begging. The remark about having continued his scientific work simply to kill time, uttered when Sard’s exclamation ‘The
Discorsi!
’ had made him aware of his visitor’s enthusiasm, came so falsely from L.’s lips that it could deceive no one.

It is furthermore important to realise that when Galileo so strongly emphasises his own condemnation of the teaching activities which are now forbidden to him he is mainly trying to deceive himself. Since working, let alone sharing the results with the outside world, would threaten whatever was left of his comfort, he himself is passionately against this ‘weakness’ which makes him like a cat that cannot stop catching mice. Indeed the audience is witnessing his defeat when it sees him yield so reluctantly yet helplessly to an urge fostered in him by society. He must consider the risks to be larger than ever because now he is wholly in the hands of the Inquisition; his punishment would no longer be a public one; and the body of people who formerly would have protested has dispersed – thanks to his own fault. And not only has the danger increased, but he would be too late now with any contribution anyway, since astronomy has become apolitical, the exclusive concern of scientists.

Watchfulness

After the young physicist has found the book for which the scientific community no longer dares to hope, he at once changes his opinion about his former teacher and launches, with great passion, into a rationalisation of Galileo’s motives for the betrayal; motives, he finds, which exonerate him completely. Galileo has recanted so that he can go on with his work and find more evidence for the truth. Galileo listens for a while, interjecting monosyllables. What he is hearing now may well be all that he can expect posterity to say in recognition of his difficult and dangerous endeavour. First he seems to be testing his pupil’s improvised theory, just in the same way as any other theory must be tested for its validity. But presently he discovers that it is not tenable. At this point, immersed in the world of his scientific concerns, he forgets his watchfulness vis-à-vis a possible eavesdropper: he stops listening for steps.

The Analysis

Galileo’s great counterattack against the golden bridge opens with a scornful outburst that abandons all grandeur: ‘Welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason! I sold out, you are a buyer.’ This is one of the few passages which gave L. trouble. He doubted whether the spectator would get the meaning of the words, apart from the fact that the words are not taken from Galileo’s usual, purely logical vocabulary. L. could not accept the playwright’s argument that there must be some gest simply showing how the opportunist damns himself by damning all who accept the rewards of opportunism; what he understood even less was that the playwright would be quite satisfied with the exhibition of a state of mind that defies rational analysis. The omission of a spiteful and strained grin at this point robbed the opening of the great instructional speech of its malice. It was not fully brought out that deriding the ignorant is the lowest form of instruction and that it is an ugly light that is shed solely for the purpose of letting one’s own light shine. Because the lowest starting point was missing some spectators were unable to gauge the full height which L. undoubtedly reached in the course of the great speech, nor was it entirely possible to see the collapse of Galileo’s vain and violently authoritarian attitude that coloured even his scientific statements. The theatrical content of the speech, in fact, is not directly concerned with the ruthless demonstration of bourgeois science’s fall from grace at the beginning of its rise – its surrender of scientific knowledge to the rulers who are authorised ‘to use it, not use it, abuse it, as it suits their ends’. The theatrical content derives from the whole course of the action, and the speech should show how well this perfect brain functions when it has to judge its owner. That man, the spectator should be able to conclude, is sitting in a hell more terrible than Dante’s, where the true function of intellect has been gambled away.

Background of the Performance

It is important to realise that our performance took place at the time and in the country of the atom bomb’s recent production and military application: a country where nuclear physics was then shrouded in deepest secrecy. The day the bomb was dropped will not easily be forgotten by anyone who spent it in the United States.

The Japanese war had cost the United States real sacrifices. The troop ships left from the west coast, and the wounded and the victims of tropical diseases returned there. When the news reached Los
Angeles it was at once clear that this was the end of the hateful war, that sons and brothers would soon come home. But the great city rose to an astonishing display of mourning. The playwright heard bus drivers and saleswomen in fruit markets express nothing but horror. It was victory, but it was the shame of defeat. Next came the suppression of the tremendous energy source by the military and politicians, and this upset the intellectuals. Freedom of investigation, the exchange of scientific discoveries, the international community of scholars: all were jettisoned by authorities that were strongly distrusted. Great physicists left the service of their bellicose government in headlong flight; one of the best known took an academic position where he was forced to waste his working time in teaching rudimentary essentials soley to escape working for the government. It had become ignominious to make new discoveries.

[From
Aufbau einer Rolle/Laughtons Galilei
, East Berlin, Henschel, 1956.]

Appendices to ‘Building up a part
’

Sense and sensuality

The demonstrative style of acting, which depicts life in such a way that it is laid open to intervention by the human reason, and which strikes Germans as thoroughly doctrinaire, presented no special difficulty to the Englishman L. What makes the sense seem so striking and insistent once it is ‘lugged in’ is our particular lack of sensuality. To lack sensuality in art is certainly senseless, nor can any sense remain healthy if it is not sensual. Reason, for us, immediately implies something cold, arbitrary, mechanical, presenting us with such pairs of alternatives as ideas and life, passion and thinking, pleasure and utility. Hence when we stage a performance of our
Faust –
a regular occurrence for educational reasons – we strip it of all sensuality and thus transport the audience into an indefinite atmosphere where they feel themselves confronted with all sorts of thoughts, no single one of which they can grasp clearly. L. didn’t even need any kind of theoretical information about the required ‘style’. He had enough taste not to make any distinction between the supposedly lofty and the supposedly base, and he detested preaching. And so he was able to unfold the great physicist’s contradictory personality in a wholly corporeal form, without either suppressing his own thoughts about the subject or forcing them on us.

Beard or no beard

In the California production L. acted without a beard, in the New York with one. This order has no significance, nor were there any fundamental discussions about it. It is the sort of case where the desire for a change can be the deciding factor. At the same time it does of course lead to modifications in the character. People who had seen the New York production confirmed what can be seen from the pictures [in the Model Book], namely that L. acted rather differently. But everything essential was still there, and the experiment can be taken as evidence to show how much room is left for the ‘personal’ element.

The leavetaking

Certainly nothing could have been more horrible than the moment when L. has finished his big speech and hastens to the table saying ‘I must eat now’, as though in delivering his insights Galileo has done everything that can be expected of him. His leavetaking from Sarti is cold. Standing absorbed in the sight of the goose he is about to eat, he replies to Sarti’s repeated attempt to express his regard for him with a formal ‘Thank you, sir’. Then, relieved of all further responsibility, he sits down pleasurably to his food.

Concluding remark

Though it resulted from several years of preparation and was brought about by sacrifices on the part of all concerned, the production of
Galileo
was seen by a bare ten thousand people. It was put on in two small theatres, a dozen times in each: first in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, and then with a completely new cast in New York. Though all the performances were sold out the notices in the main papers were bad. Against that could be set the favourable remarks of such people as Charles Chaplin and Erwin Piscator, as well as the interest of the public, which looked like being enough to fill the theatre for some considerable time. But the size of the cast meant that the potential earnings were low even if business was really good, and when an artistically interested producer made an offer it had to be rejected because L., having already turned down a number of film engagements and made considerable sacrifices, could not afford to turn down another. So the whole thing remained a private operation by a great artist who, while earning his keep outside the theatre, indulged himself by displaying a splendid piece of work to a (not very large) number of
interested parties. Though this is something that needed to be said, it does not however convey the complete picture. Given the way the American theatre was organised in those years, it was impossible that such plays and such productions should reach their audience. Productions like this one, therefore, should be treated as examples of a kind of theatre that might become possible under other political and economic conditions. Their achievements, like their mistakes, make them object lessons for anyone who is looking for a theatre of great themes and rewarding acting.

[From Werner Hecht (ed.),
Materialien zu Brechts ‘Leben des Galilei
, pp. 78–80. In the last of these notes Brecht is perhaps being undeservedly kind to Laughton, since the actor’s wariness of Communist associations, at a time when Brecht and Hanns Eisler were being heard by the Un-American Activities Committee, appears to have been another strong factor in deciding him to close the play.]

After the Italian fashion, a lightly built stage that is recognisable as having been lightly built. Nothing stony, weighty, massive. No interior decoration.

Colour to emerge from the costumes, i.e. in movement.

The stage shows Galileo’s background, making use of contemporary evidence (Leonardo’s technical drawings, Romulus and Remus with the she-wolf, a man of war from the Venice arsenal and so on).

No projections, since this would prevent the full illumination of the stage. Giant photographs, maybe, nobly suspended. A flagged floor.

[Dated October 3 and 5, 1955. From Werner Hecht (ed.),
ibid
., p. 88. The eventual stage set ror the Berliner Ensemble’s production, completed by Erich Engel after Brecht’s death and first performed on January 15, 1957, was somewhat different from this.]

Much of the information that follows, including some of the quotations from Brecht, is derived from Ernst Schumacher’s
Drama und Geschichte. Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Leben des Galilei’ und andere Stücke
, Henschel, East Berlin, 1965, whose usefulness is gratefully acknowledged.

Judging by the proportion of Brecht’s papers devoted to it in the Brecht Archive in Berlin,
Galileo
is much the most heavily worked-over of all his plays. None of the others went through such stages, for not only did
Galileo
occupy him during the last nineteen years of his life, but its linguistic, theatrical, and thematic bases all changed drastically during that period, as did the dramatist’s own circumstances. Thus it was written in German, then entirely rewritten in English (with Brecht himself contributing in a mixture of English and German), then rewritten in German once more largely on the basis of the English-language version. Again, it was first written with no clear prospect of production, then rewritten for a specific actor, Laughton, and a specific production before an American audience, then rewritten once more for Brecht’s own Berliner Ensemble to play in East Berlin. During Brecht’s work on the first version, it became known that Niels Bohr had split the uranium atom; then while he and Laughton were preparing the second, the first atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. Finally, Brecht himself was at first living as an exile, close to Germany, on the eve of an impending war; he rewrote the play once in the aura of Hollywood, when an allied victory was at last certain, then the second time after his own successful reestablishment in his country, within a bitterly divided world.