Change Hamlet to Galileo and that appears to be some of the thinking behind the production at present on the Belvoir stage. The play is certainly strong enough to survive adaptation. Brecht himself produced three different versions. In the first, written in 1938 in exile from Nazi Germany in Denmark, Galileo, as described by Peter D. Smith, is ‘the archetypal scientist … [who] represents the plight of the intellectual attempting to survive beneath the Nazi regime’. Under the title And Yet it Moves, this version premièred in Switzerland in September 1943.

Relocated to Los Angeles, Brecht formed a friendship with the British actor Charles Laughton, whose career, like his clifftop garden, was on the slide and who relished the chance to take on this huge role. Laughton agreed to work on an English language version with Brecht. Beginning work in 1944, their progress was slow and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused a rethink. Galileo’s recantation is seen as the moment when knowledge took a back seat to power, and not even the smuggling out of Italy of his Discorsi exonerates him. This version – nominally directed by Joseph Losey, though both Laughton and Brecht were very much in charge – opened at the Coronet Theatre on 30 July 1947. After a brief run, it had an even briefer one in New York. The third and final version is basically the American version with some additions. Since then, playwrights of the calibre of Howard Brenton, David Hare, and David Edgar have produced varied but actable renderings.

If Tom Wright, whose ‘concentration’ of the play is Belvoir’s addition to the list, was setting out to prove that Brecht is the didactic bore his detractors claim him to be, he couldn’t have done a better job. As he says in his program notes, to reduce this mammoth work with eighteen characters to an ensemble of nine is a hugely challenging task. His solution is to have Galileo as the sun around whom all the other characters revolve. ‘Seen through one end of the telescope they’re lesser beings scrabbling around a colossus. But seen through the other, they’re true humans, with real concerns.’ The trouble is we really only get to see them through the first end of that telescope.

Wright gives us Galileo the visionary scientist, but because the other characters are so inchoate we get little feeling for his differing relationships, and the contrast between Padua, Florence, and Rome is presented in the most superficial way. One could fill pages with what is missing, but let us just take a few examples. Brecht shows us the disparate group of Galileo’s assistants bonding over the years as they work with him, but here they are so underdeveloped, and in the case of the lens-grinder Federzoni non-existent, that the agonising scene in which they wait to hear if Galileo has recanted goes for little.

We get no real understanding of the dramatic arc that Brecht set up for Galileo’s daughter, Virginia. We do get Galileo’s sacrifice of her happiness when his desire for knowledge destroys her chance for marriage, but making the landlady’s son Andrea (whom Galileo encourages in his scientific interests) a girl obscures Galileo’s casual sexism. When his equally inquisitive daughter wants to look through the newfangled telescope he refuses to let her, telling her dismissively, ‘It’s not a toy.’ Denied an education, she reverts to superstition and religion. In a chilling scene omitted from this production, she is convinced by the Inquisitor that her father’s theories are anathema and eventually becomes his jailor. None of this is made clear, so we have no understanding why Virginia, who seemed so supportive, suddenly becomes a religious zealot.

Colin Friels and Rajan Velu in Life of Galileo (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Most drastic is Wright’s portrayal of Cardinal Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII. Brecht was very definite about the fact that he wanted the church held up neither to vilification or to mockery – ‘no kind of caricature of the Church is intended’. His Barberini is a subtle debater, a man of science as well as religion. But in a scene dismaying for its witless vulgarity, Wright’s Barberini becomes a gyrating nincompoop. 

If these things are among the missing, what is actually present? Well Colin Friels’ Galileo is omnipresent. Wright has included all of Galileo’s major speeches, and Friels attacks them with energy, intelligence, and determination. The problem is that because we get no real understanding of his relationships to the characters he is addressing, they come across as a series of disparate arias rather than as a conversation. Only in his scene with Rajan Velu’s Fulgenzio, the little monk, does any real rapport develop. Friels’ wiry frenetic vitality is a long way from the Brecht–Laughton conception of the role. The neurasthenic Brecht admired people who combined ability with an enjoyment of the good things in life. He wrote a little poem to Laughton’s belly, and his Galileo combined greed for knowledge with simple greed. If we are not convinced that Friels’ Galileo is the glutton he is supposed to be, it is a minor flaw in what, in different circumstances, could have developed into a major performance. 

 Peter Carroll and Miranda Parker in Life of Galileo (photograph by Brett Boardman)

The rest of the cast do what they can with what they have been given. As we have seen, Velu makes his mark with Fulgenzio and delivers the little monk’s big speech effectively. Sonia Todd has some fun with a harassed Vice Chancellor. Peter Carroll and Damien Ryan are as effective as the circumstances allow them to be with the famous scene in which the Inquisitor bends the newly elected Urban VIII to his will as the pope is being imprisoned in his papal insignia. Since we have had little previous acquaintance with either of them, the scene comes out of the blue. 

Director Eamon Flack and designer Zoe Atkinson’s decision to stage the play in the round is effective and Flack moves his actors well. The modern costuming is less effective, being either so nondescript as to make no distinction of wealth or class, or so crassly flamboyant that it undercuts the seriousness of the scene. 

Poised as we are at a moment when scientists’ increasingly frantic warnings are being denied by those in power, a new look at Brecht’s play could have been enlightening. It is a pity that this was a missed opportunity.

Life of Galileo, produced by Belvoir St Theatre, continues until 15 September 2019. Performance attended: August 7.