Galileo
at Rocket @ St John's Hall (Venue 126), Edinburgh

James Panton

There is something very apt about presenting Brecht's Life of Galileo, a study of the relationship of ideas, science and truth to social hierarchies and ideology, in the year 2000.

The transition from Ptolemean geocentricism to Copernican heliocentrism (which Brecht tells through a romanticised account of the life of Galileo) challenged the entirety of man's understanding of his relationship to himself, his fellow man and to God. What could it mean for God to be 'up there' and hell 'down below' in a universe which no longer had the Earth at its centre? More practically, what could the role of the Church be if they were no longer at the centre of that world, mediating between the good above and the evil below?

For Brecht's Galileo, it was the Church of Rome which rejected the new science and man's capacity to know the world. For us now, it is the environmentalists, the risk-conscious and the anti-corpratists who challenge man's scientific interventions in the world of nature and berate our new sciences as unnatural, unnecessary or downright dangerous. The comparison, however, is striking. The Harvard-Westlake School and the Rembiko Project's second offering is therefore another serious and challenging piece of theatre, the other being Saint Joan with which it alternates, and which together they have called 'Martyrdom in 99 minutes'. And again, it is an originally produced and well-performed piece of drama. The cast are enthusiastic and, though inexperienced (they are all only 16 and 17 years old) often convincing. The set is simple and original (torches for telescopes and step ladders for thrones). The live school chamber orchestra play beautifully throughout the performance. This is more than a high school production, and I do not doubt that a number of its contributors will be seen again in years to come.