Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (36 page)

The awkward circumstance that one translator knew no German and the other scarcely any English compelled us, as can be seen, from the outset to use acting as our means of translation. We were forced to do what better-equipped translators should do too: to translate gests. For language is theatrical in so far as it primarily expresses the mutual attitude of the speakers. (For the ‘arias’, as has been described, we brought in the playwright’s own gest, by observing the bel canto of Shakespeare or the writers of the Bible.)

In a most striking and occasionally brutal way L. showed his lack of interest in the ‘book’, to an extent the playwright could not always share. What we were making was just a text; the performance was all that counted. Impossible to lure him to translate passages which the playwright was willing to cut for the proposed performance but wanted to keep in the book. The theatrical occasion was what mattered, the text was only there to make it possible: it would be expended in the production, would be consumed in it like gunpowder
in a firework. Although L.’s theatrical experience had been in a London which had become thoroughly indifferent to the theatre, the old Elizabethan London still lived in him, the London where theatre was such a passion that it could swallow immortal works of art greedily and barefacedly as so many ‘texts’. These works which have survived the centuries were in fact like improvisations thrown off for an all-important moment. Printing them at all was a matter of little interest, and probably only took place so that the spectators – in other words, those who were present at the actual event, the performance – might have a souvenir of their enjoyment. And the theatre seems in those days to have been so potent that the cuts and interpolations made at rehearsal can have done little harm to the text.

We used to work in L.’s small library, in the mornings. But often L. would come and meet me in the garden, running barefoot in shirt and trousers over the damp grass, and would show me some changes in his flowerbeds, for his garden always occupied him, providing many problems and subtleties. The gaiety and the beautiful proportions of this world of flowers overlapped in a most pleasant way into our work. For quite a while our work embraced everything we could lay our hands on. If we discussed gardening it was only a digression from one of the scenes in
Galileo
; if we combed a New York museum for technical drawings by Leonardo to use as background pictures in the performance we would digress to Hokusai’s graphic work. L., I could see, would make only marginal use of such material. The parcels of books or photocopies from books, which he persistently ordered, never turned him into a bookworm. He obstinately sought for the external: not for physics but for the physicists’ behaviour. It was a matter of putting together a bit of theatre, something slight and superficial. As the material piled up, L. became set on the idea of getting a good draughtsman to produce entertaining sketches in the manner of Caspar Neher, to expose the anatomy of the action. ‘Before you amuse others you have to amuse yourself,’ he said.

For this no trouble was too great. As soon as L. heard of Caspar Neher’s delicate stage sketches, which allow the actors to group themselves according to a great artist’s compositions and to take up attitudes that are both precise and realistic, he asked an excellent draughtsman from the Walt Disney Studios to make similar sketches. They were a little malicious; L. used them, but with caution.

What pains he took over the costumes, not only his own, but those of all the actors! And how much time we spent on the casting of the many parts!

First we had to look through works on costume and old pictures in order to find costumes that were free of any element of fancy dress. We sighed with relief when we found a small sixteenth-century panel that showed long trousers. Then we had to distinguish the classes. There the elder Brueghel was of great service. Finally we had to work out the colour scheme. Each scene had to have its basic tone: the first, e.g., a delicate morning of white, yellow, and grey. But the entire sequence of scenes had to have its development in terms of colour. In the first scene a deep and distinguished blue made its entrance with Ludovico Marsili, and this deep blue remained, set apart, in the second scene with the upper bourgeoisie in their blackish-green coats made of felt and leather. Galileo’s social ascent could be followed by means of colour. The silver and pearl-grey of the fourth (court) scene led into a nocturne in brown and black (where Galileo is jeered by the monks of the Collegium Romanum), then on to the seventh, the cardinals’ ball, with delicate and fantastic individual masks (ladies and gentlemen) moving about the cardinals’ crimson figures. That was a burst of colour, but it still had to be fully unleashed, and this occurred in the tenth scene, the carnival. After the nobility and the cardinals the poor people too had their masquerade. Then came the descent into dull and sombre colours. The difficulty of such a plan of course lies in the fact that the costumes and their wearers wander through several scenes; they have always to fit in and contribute to the colour scheme of the new scene.

We filled the parts mainly with young actors. The speeches presented certain problems. The American stage shuns speeches except in (maybe because of) its frightful Shakespearean productions. Speeches just mean a break in the story; and, as commonly delivered, that is what they are. L. worked with the young actors in a masterly and conscientious manner, and the playwright was impressed by the freedom he allowed them, by the way in which he avoided anything Laughtonish and simply taught them the structure. To those actors who were too easily influenced by his own personality he read passages from Shakespeare, without rehearsing the actual text at all; to none did he read the text itself. The actors were incidentally asked on no account to prove their suitability for the part by putting something ‘impressive’ into it.

We jointly agreed on the following points:

1. The decorations should not be of a kind to suggest to the spectators that they are in a medieval Italian room or the Vatican. The audience should be conscious of being in a theatre.

2. The background should show more than the scene directly
surrounding Galileo; in an imaginative and artistically pleasing way, it should show the historical setting, but still remain background. (This can be achieved when the decoration itself is not independently colourful, but helps the actors’ costumes and enhances the roundedness of the figures by remaining two-dimensional even when it contains three-dimensional elements, etc.)

3. Furniture and props (including doors) should be realistic and above all be of social and historical interest. Costumes must be individualised and show signs of having been worn. Social differences were to be underlined since we find it difficult to distinguish them in ancient fashions. The colours of the various costumes should harmonise.

4. The characters’ groupings must have the quality of historical paintings (but not to bring out the historical aspect as an aesthetic attraction; this is a directive which is equally valid for contemporary plays). The director can achieve this by inventing historical titles for the episodes. (In the first scene such titles might be
Galileo the physicist explains the new Copernican theory to his subsequent collaborator Andrea Sarti and predicts the great historical importance of astronomy – To make a living the great Galileo teaches rich pupils – Galileo who has requested support for his continued investigations is admonished by the university officials to invent profitable instruments – Galileo constructs his first telescope based on information from a traveller.)

5. The action must be presented calmly and in a large sweep. Frequent changes of position involving irrelevant movements of the characters must be avoided. The director must not for a moment forget that many of the actions and speeches are hard to understand and that it is therefore necessary to express the underlying idea of an episode by the positioning. The audience must be assured that when someone walks, or gets up, or makes a gesture it has meaning and deserves attention. But groupings and movements must always remain realistic.

6. In casting the ecclesiastical dignitaries realism is of more than ordinary importance. No caricature of the church is intended, but the refined manner of speech and the ‘breeding’ of the seventeenth-century hierarchy must not mislead the director into picking spiritual types. In this play, the church mainly represents authority; as types the dignitaries should resemble our present-day bankers and senators.

7. The portrayal of Galileo should not aim at rousing the audience to sympathy or empathy; they should rather be encouraged to adopt a deliberate attitude of wonder and criticism. Galileo should be portrayed
as a phenomenon of the order of Richard III; the audience’s emotions will be engaged by the vitality of this strange figure.

8. The more profoundly the historical seriousness of a production is established, the more scope can be given to humour. The more sweeping the overall plan, the more intimately individual scenes can be played.

9. There is no reason why
Life of Galileo
cannot be performed without drastically changing the present-day style of production, as a historical ‘war-horse’, for instance, with a star part. Any conventional performance, however (which need not seem at all conventional to the actors, especially if it contained interesting inventions), would weaken the play’s real strength considerably without making it any easier for the audience. The play’s main effects will be missed unless the theatre changes its attitude. The stock reply, ‘Won’t work here,’ is familiar to the author; he heard it at home too. Most directors treat such plays as a coachman would have treated an automobile when it was first invented. On the arrival of the machine, mistrusting the practical instructions accompanying it, this coachman would have harnessed horses in front – more horses, of course, than to a carriage, since the new car was heavier – and then, his attention being drawn to the engine, he would have said, ‘Won’t work here.’
*

The performance took place in a small theatre in Beverly Hills, and L.’s chief worry was the prevailing heat. He asked that trucks full of ice be parked against the theatre walls and fans be set in motion ‘so that the audience can think’.

Notes on individual scenes

1

The first thing L. did when he set to work was to rid the figure of Galileo of the pallid, spiritual, stargazing aura of the text books. Above all, the scholar must be made into a man. The very term ‘scholar’ [Gelehrter] sounds somewhat ridiculous when used by simple people; there is an implication of having been prepared and fitted, of something passive. In Bavaria people used to speak of the
Nuremberg Funnel by which simpletons were more or less forcibly fed undue quantities of knowledge, a kind of enema for the brain. When someone had ‘crammed himself with learning’, that too was considered unnatural. The educated – again one of those hopelessly passive words – talked of the revenge of the ‘uneducated’, of their innate hatred for the mind; and it is true that their contempt was often mixed with hatred; in villages and working-class districts, the mind was considered something alien, even hostile. The same contempt, however, could also be found among the ‘better classes’. A scholar was an impotent, bloodless, quaint figure, conceited and barely fit to live. He was an easy prey for romantic treatment. L.’s Galileo never strayed far from the engineer at the great arsenal in Venice. His eyes were there to see with, not to flash, his hands to work with, not to gesticulate. Everything worth seeing or feeling L. derived from Galileo’s profession, his pursuit of physics and his teaching, the teaching, that is, of something very concrete with its concomitant real difficulties. And he portrayed the external side not just for the sake of the inner man – that is to say, research and everything connected with it, not just for the sake of the resulting psychological reactions – these reactions, rather, were never separated from the everyday business and conflicts, they never became ‘universally human’, even though they never lost their universal appeal. In the case of the Richard III of Shakespeare’s theatre, the spectator can easily change himself along with the actor, since the king’s politics and warfare play only a very vague role; there is hardly more of it than a dreaming man would understand. But with Galileo it is a continual handicap to the spectator that he knows much less about science than does Galileo. It is a piquant fact that in representing the history of Galileo, both playwright and actor had to undo the notion which Galileo’s betrayal had helped to create, the notion that schoolteachers and scientists are by nature absent-minded, hybrid, castrated. (Only in our own day when, in the shape of ruling-class hirelings remote from the people, they delivered the latest product of Galileo’s laws of motion, did popular contempt change to fear.) As for Galileo himself, for many centuries, all over Europe, the people honoured him for his belief in a popularly based science by refusing to believe in his recantation.

We divided the first scene into several parts:

We had the advantage that the beginning of the story was also a beginning for Galileo, that is, his encounter with the telescope, and
since the significance of this encounter is hidden from him for the time being, our solution was to derive the joy of beginning from the early morning: having him wash with cold water – L., with bare torso, lifted a copper pitcher with a quick sweeping motion to let the jet of water fall into the basin – find his open books on the high desk, have his first sip of milk, and give his first lesson, as it happens, to a young boy. As the scene unfolds, Galileo keeps coming back to his reading at the high desk, annoyed at being interrupted by the returning student with his shallow preference for new-fangled inventions such as this spyglass, and by the procurator of the university who denies him a grant; finally reaching the last obstacle that keeps him from his work, the testing of the lenses which, however, would not have been possible without the two prior interruptions, and makes an entirely new field of work accessible.