Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Read Online Free Page B

surprisinglyclosely 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.
    Brecht all along was writing about attitudes which he couldunderstand and even sympathise with; it is a play that contains very little element of caricature. This does not turn his Galileo into the self-portrait it is sometimes alleged to be, particularly by those who wish to present Brecht as a ‘survivor’ – as if surviving was not a very reputable thing for him to have done. Nor does it bear out Isaac Deutscher’s interpretation of the first version as an apologia for those who, like Brecht himself, supported Stalin whilst disliking many aspects of his regime. Not that such autobiographical considerations – which can of course be clamped on to almost any play – are much help to the director, who has first and foremost to take the work at its face value. What matters here is the overlaying of the original message, about the need at all costs to establish and communicate the truth in defiance of authority, by Brecht’s growing recognition of the losses that this may involve: for instance, the creation of such a cleft between the intellectual and the average man that the former eventually comes to overlook the social consequences of his research. The intertwining of these two contradictory morals has presented problems to actor and director alike, and of course it devalues the original happy ending. None the less it represents a considerable enrichment both of the Galileo figure and of the story; while taking away nothing from the vividness with which the scientific attitude is depicted, it cuts down the improbabilities and brings the whole thing closer to the uneasy compromises of real life. The problem