La Vie de Galilée

BERTOLT BRECHT WAS LATE BEING ADMITTED to the Comédie-Française Repertoire. Antigone was performed in 1972 at the Théâtre de l’Odéon –whose programming was partly decided by the Comédie-Française Administrator Pierre Dux– in a staging by Jean-Pierre Miquel. In 1976, Salle Richelieu audiences were able to see Mr Puntila and his Man Matti in a production by Guy Retoré. And in 1990, Life of Galileo was directed by Antoine Vitez, General Administrator at the time, a few weeks before his death. Written between 1938 and 1939 and reworked until 1954, the play reflects the questions of the time concerning the progress of science and the importance of not losing sight of the fact that its aim is to reduce human misery. As it happened, between 1938 and 1954, humanity had to come to terms with the emergence of the atomic threat.
Mother Courage entered the Repertoire in 1998 (directed by Jorge Lavelli), The Threepenny Opera in 2011 (directed by Laurent Pelly), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in 2017 (Katharina Thalbach) while A Respectable Wedding was directed by Isabelle Osthues at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 2011.

Brecht’s Life of Galileo contrasts knowledge and truth with the obscurantism and dogmatism of religious power. While scholars and scientists are rarely represented in the theatrical repertoire, other heroes defend causes of a different nature.

Patriotic and political causes pitting the courage and the desire for liberty of the powerless against the rule of might: Antigone (in plays by Sophocles or Anouilh), Spartacus (by Bernard-Joseph Saurin, 1760), William Tell (by Antoine-Marin Lemierre, 1766), Du Guesclin and Joan of Arc are therefore the heroes of such causes.

While religion can be oppressive, as depicted in Life of Galileo, where it condemns a scientist for heresy, conversely the theatre can illustrate the oppression to which religion is itself subjected. The lives of saints and Bible characters are the main subject of medieval theatre (mysteries). When the Comédie-Française was created, the genre had disappeared, but some plays depicted the lives of the martyrs and turned the protagonists of these struggles into heroes, such as Pierre Corneille’s Polyeucte, the Christian tragedy Cassius et Victorinus, martyrs (1732) written by La Grange-Chancel, or Jean de Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint-Genest, comédien et martyr (dating from 1644, it entered the Repertoire in 1988). In 1930, Edmond Haraucourt’s La Passion revived the form of the medieval mystery. The defence of religious freedom has also generated dramatic literature: Jean-Louis Laya’s Jean Calas (1790) denounces attacks against Protestants, Montherlant's Port-Royal (1954) depicts the persecutions to which Jansenists were subjected. On the other hand, the atheist protagonist of Dom Juan affirms his will not to believe.

Societal causes are also addressed by the Repertoire: the rights of people of colour in Olympe de Gouges’ L’Esclavage des nègres, the place of women in society in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the oppression of homosexuality in the theatre of Genet.
The opposition between truth and blind power is addressed by Shakespeare in Hamlet, whose hero is the only one to “see” a hidden truth, the murder of his father by Claudius who took the latter’s place at the head of the Kingdom and in Gertrude’s heart.

But Brecht’s play is fundamentally original insofar as Galileo’s conviction (heliocentrism, versus the geocentrism advocated by the Church) is based on facts, science and demonstrations, which all the more violently reveal the contradictions of his opponents; “Whoever does not know the truth is merely an idiot. But whoever knows it and calls it a lie is a criminal” states the protagonist, repeating one of the historical character’s most famous phrases.
In the same way, the philosophers Socrates, Descartes and Rousseau appear in some plays and defend their freedom of thought, which sometimes meant risking their lives.

Galileo, one of the few scientists in the Repertoire, was brought to the stage before Brecht by François Ponsard (1867) in a play of the same name that earned lots of headlines and drew the ire of the clerical establishment against the author.