"Where once was certainty, let there be doubt"

As always seems to be the case, it takes a few half-hearted or botched attempts to catch the intriguing fare on offer at the Rep for me to finally forge ahead and book tickets before the moment passes. Even then, we nearly missed out on Wednesday, only grabbing tickets on Tuesday and discovering later that evening that friends had found themselves out of luck.

The big draw was Bertolt Brecht's 'The Life Of Galileo', translated by David Hare. Well into its two week run it was still selling out.

The play dramatises the centuries-old dialogue or conflict between religion and science by focussing upon a particularly critical phase in the battle, and upon one individual's role in it. Galileo was instrumental in ensuring the triumph of reason over superstition, but such victories must be fought and won in every generation - as Francis Wheen's 'How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World' and the current debate in the US about the teaching of creationism in parallel with evolution attest.

Though Galileo's ultimate victory is endorsed within the structure of the play, he is by no means consistently venerated. Early on he is shown to be something of a hack, being told of the concept of a rudimentary telescope and then passing the idea off as his own for material gain, and later his recantation of his view that the Earth revolves around the sun, under pressure from the Grand Inquisitor of the Catholic Church, has a devastatingly disillusioning effect on his young disciples.

The play is about more than simply the religion vs science debate, though. It also draws attention to the fact that Galileo's arguments about the solar system had much wider implications - from necessitating an acceptance that human existence is contingent and that we are not at the centre of the universe metaphorically as well as geographically speaking, to the political dimension which suggested that the discovery would liberate the lower classes from the bondage in which they were kept by the Church, subservient to their masters about whom they revolved like the planets supposedly had the Earth. In the early part of the play, too, Galileo's "discovery" of the telescope and the rantings of the University of Padua's Bursar on the need to produce marketable research strikes a particularly resonant chord today, especially for those of us whose research is never likely to reap what is sown in financial terms.

So much for the play - what about the performance? Well, outgoing artistic director Jonathan Church's production isn't that spectacular (neither is Ruari Murchison's set, for that matter), hampered in particular by the inability of the lead actor, the well-established and well-respected thesp Timothy West, to remember his lines - a fact noted by another blogger to witness the production, earlier in its run. Admittedly he carries nearly the whole weight of the play on his shoulders, and at times his mumblings convey a vexed, scatty and bumbling scientist rather well, but they occur far too often for it to be intentional and often it's simply seat-squirmingly awkward to watch. In the second half there was a marked improvement, but for one of my theatre-going accomplices West's performance came perilously close to blighting the whole night.