Galileo is a measure of the standard of Italian intellectuals in the first third of the seventeenth century, when they were defeated by the feudal nobility. Northern countries like Holland and England developed productive forces further by means of what is called the Industrial Revolution. In a sense Galileo was responsible both for its technical creation and for its social betrayal.
[Crime and Cunning]
The first version of the play ended differently. Galileo had written the Discorsi in the utmost secrecy. He uses the visit of his favourite pupil Andrea to get him to smuggle the book across the frontier. His recantation had given him the chance to create a seminal work. He had been wise.
In the Californian version […] Galileo interrupts his pupil’s hymns of praise to prove to him that his recantation had been a crime, and was not to be compensated by this work, important as it might be.
In case anybody is interested, this is also the opinion of the playwright.
[Shortened from Werner Hecht (ed.), ibid., pp. 32–37. These notes were written at various times, those on scene 14 mainly during Brecht’s work on the Berliner Ensemble production. The reference to a new critical introduction to the Discorsi must relate to a proposed change which Brecht never made; it is not to be found in our text.]
BUILDING UP A PART: LAUGHTON’S GALILEO*
Preface
In describing Laughton’s Galileo Galilei the playwright is setting out not so much to try and give a little more permanence to one of those fleeting works of art that actors create, as to pay tribute to the pains a great actor is prepared to take over a fleeting work of this sort. This is no longer at all common. It is not just that the under-rehearsing in our hopelessly commercialised theatre is to blame for lifeless and stereotyped portraits – give the average actor more time, and he would hardly do better. Nor is it simply that this century has very few outstanding individualists with rich characteristics and rounded contours – if that were all, care could be devoted to the portrayal of lesser figures. Above all it is that we seem to have lost any understanding and appreciation of what we may call a theatrical conception: what Garrick did when, as Hamlet, he met his father’s ghost; Sorel when, as Phèdre, she knew that she was going to die; Bassermann when, as Philip, he had finished listening to Posa. It is a question of inventiveness.
The spectator could isolate and detach such theatrical conceptions, but they combined to form a single rich texture. Odd insights into men’s nature, glimpses of their particular way of living together, were brought about by the ingenious contrivance of the actors.
With works of art, even more than with philosophical systems, it is impossible to find out how they are made. Those who make them work hard to give the impression that everything just happens, as it were of its own accord, as though an image were forming in a clear mirror that is itself inert. Of course this is a deception, and apparently the idea is that if it comes off it will increase the spectator’s pleasure. In fact it does not. What the spectator – anyway the experienced spectator – enjoys about art is the making of art, the active creative element. In art we view nature herself as if she were an artist.
The ensuing account deals with this aspect, with the process of manufacture rather than with the result. It is less a matter of the artist’s temperament than of the notion of reality which he has and communicates; less a matter of his vitality than of the observations which underlie his portraits and can be derived from them. This means neglecting much that seemed to us to be ‘inimitable’ in Laughton’s achievement, and going on rather to what can be learned from it. For we cannot create talent; we can only set it tasks.
It is unnecessary here to examine how the artists of the past used to astonish their public. Asked why he acted, L. answered: ‘Because people don’t know what they are like, and I think I can show them.’ His collaboration in the rewriting of the play showed that he had all sorts of ideas which were begging to be disseminated, about how people really live together, about the motive forces that need to be taken into account here. L.’s attitude seemed to the playwright to be that of a realistic artist of our time. For whereas in relatively stationary (’quiet’) periods artists may find it possible to merge wholly with their public and to be a faithful ‘embodiment’ of the general conception, our profoundly unsettled time forces them to take special measures to penetrate to the truth. Our society will not admit of its own accord what makes it move. It can even be said to exist purely through the secrecy with which it surrounds itself. What attracted L. about Life of Galileo was not only one or two formal points but also the subject matter; he thought this might become what he called a contribution. And so great was his anxiety to show things as they really are that despite all his indifference (indeed timidity) in political matters he suggested and even demanded that not a few of the play’s points should be made sharper, on the simple ground that such passages seemed ‘somehow weak’ to him, by which he meant that they did not do justice to things as they are.
We usually met in L.’s big house above the Pacific, as the dictionaries of synonyms were too bulky to lug about. He had continual and inexhaustibly patient recourse to these tomes, and used in addition to fish out the most varied literary texts in order to examine this or that gest, or some particular mode of speech: Aesop, the Bible, Moliere, Shakespeare. In my house he gave readings of Shakespeare’s works to which he would devote perhaps a fortnight’s preparation. In this way he read The Tempest and King Lear, simply for me and one or two guests who happened to have dropped in. Afterward we would briefly discuss what seemed relevant, an ‘aria’ perhaps or an effective scene opening. These were exercises and he would pursue them in various directions, assimilating them in the rest of his work. If he had to give a reading on the radio he would get me to hammer out the syncopated rhythms of Whitman’s poems (which he found somewhat strange) on a table with my fists, and once he hired a studio where we recorded half a dozen ways of telling the story of the creation, in which he was an African planter telling the Negroes how he had created the world, or an English butler ascribing it to His Lordship. We needed such broadly ramified studies, because he spoke no German whatever and we had to decide the gest of dialogue by my acting it all in bad English or even in German and his then acting it back in proper English in a variety of ways until I could say: That’s it. The result he would write down sentence by sentence in longhand. Some sentences, indeed many, he carried around for days, changing them continually. This system of performance-and-repetition had one immense advantage in that psychological discussions were almost entirely avoided. Even the most fundamental gests, such as Galileo’s way of observing, or his showmanship, or his craze for pleasure, were established in three dimensions by actual performance. Our first concern throughout was for the smallest fragments, for sentences, even for exclamations – each treated separately, each needing to be given the simplest, freshly fitted form, giving so much away, hiding so much or leaving it more. More radical changes in the structure of entire scenes or of the work itself were meant to help the story to move and to bring our fairly general conclusions about people’s attitudes to the great physicist. But this reluctance to tinker with the psychological aspect remained with L. all through our long period of collaboration, even when a rough draft of the play was ready and he was giving various readings in order to test reactions, and even during the rehearsals.
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
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Bertolt Brecht: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder 5 Page 26