The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’ ‘The earth is a star like any other.’ ‘Heaven has been abolished.’ It’s thrilling to see aeons of Aristotelian tradition being shattered and remade in the space of a couple of cloudless evenings on an Italian hillside. But the play drags once Galileo comes into conflict with the Church.
The Faith versus Reason ding-dong becomes wordy and repetitive. Brecht can’t find a subtler or spicier line of argument for Galileo than ‘The man who knows the truth and denies it is a criminal.’ And he can’t think up a single decent argument for the Church. Bad craftsmanship. The best playwrights make their hero’s opponents as powerful, ingenious and resourceful as possible, but Brecht allows his distaste for authority to seep into his portrayal of the Church, whose cardinals are sly, self-righteous bigots incapable of presenting their position persuasively. Pity. By failing to arm the cardinals intellectually, Brecht doesn’t undermine the cardinals, he undermines his play.
Bunny Christie’s magical design integrates magnificent views of the moon into an overarching sphere representing the cosmos. Despite its longueurs, David Hare’s adaptation has flashes of wonderful lyricism. In the closing scene, a young astronomer prepares to smuggle Galileo’s last treatise out of Italy into northern Europe. Galileo: ‘Be careful as you go through Germany with the truth under your coat.’ A line that knocks on the door of posterity. Best of all is Simon Russell Beale, who seems to have spent the last year or two portraying bumbling brainboxes in rather contrived sitting-room comedies. He plays Galileo with his habitual ease and that pervasive air of watchful amusement. Mind you, it must be depressing to work alongside him. He makes everyone else look as if they’re acting.
Talking of which, the Globe’s new Antony and Cleopatra is a bizarre, wonky affair. Terrific performances in the smaller roles, particularly Peter Hamilton Dyer as a brooding, craven Menas, and Jack Ridgeway as Octavius, the baby-faced dictator. But the big problem is Antony. The press have had fun with Nicholas Jones, likening him to an unshaved rubber band, a camp dentist, an understudy eunuch and Andy Pandy. All very unfair. Jones is a decent comedian who can make the crowd roar with laughter when he pulls one of his hapless Bruce Forsyth faces. But these are the gifts of a light entertainer, not an actor playing the ultimate he-man warrior. I never believed for a second that Frances Barber’s purring, sinuous queen could feel the faintest spark of attraction for Jones’s cheeky-chappy buffoon. The only scenes that work properly are those where Antony is either absent or dead.
Barber was born to play Cleopatra and she’s probably been rehearsing the role in her bedroom since she was 12, and here it is, a huge and beautifully judged performance that reaches into every corner of Cleopatra’s psyche, from the comic self-knowledge of her sexual abandonment to the desperate splendour of her suicide. It’s completely mesmerising and, alas, completely compromised. I shudder to think that this half-great, half-awful production will have to flounder and lurch through the summer like a quinquereme with a hole in its keel.
If Dominic Dromgoole were a serious director he would admit his error in casting a vaudeville comedian in the role of Shakespeare’s Achilles, and make amends as follows. Drop Jones (and offer him Malvolio in Twelfth Night next year as compensation) and start casting about for an Antony who can match at least three of Barber’s principal virtues: beauty, majesty, vocal firepower, sexual electricity and tragic grandeur. There’d be a huge fuss, of course, which would eventually benefit everyone involved. Jones would be engulfed in a storm of sympathetic publicity (whereas now he’s engulfed in a storm of Andy Pandy jokes), and as the innocent victim he would attract bucketloads of favourable exposure. Cleopatra would get the Antony she deserves and Dromgoole would establish himself as a rebel-genius who is ready to tear up the rule-book and sacrifice an actor’s vanity on the altar of theatrical excellence. Somehow I don’t think any of this will happen, though, and Barber may be reduced to spiking Jones’s interval cuppa with a paralysing tincture that wears off after three months. Or putting an asp in his tights.
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