Theater: A Passion for Survival

Galileo. Bertolt Brecht believed that historical forces rendered the individual obsolete and, paradoxically, wrote plays in which flawed, split, and roguishly tenacious personalities like Mother Courage and Galileo exhibit a passion for survival that dwarfs history and dominates the stage. Galileo, offered last week at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, is like a formal ballet of the mind in which the prince of science and the princes of the church dance out their accustomed roles. But for Western civilized man, Galileo's recantation before the Cardinal Inquisitor (Shepperd Strudwick) has the power and poignance of Socrates drinking hemlock.

Brecht's vision of the theater as a classroom works ideally in Galileo. To the audience, the great astronomer plays teacher, a kind of intellectual locksmith picking at the rusty encrustations of habit, custom and tradition as he elucidates his proofs that the earth revolves around the sun. This Galileo is a glutton of food, wine and ideas. As one character says, he has "thinking bouts." As Brecht sees it, this very appetite is Galileo's fatal flaw. His desire to save his skin ranks above any devotion to a pure priesthood of science, any will to suffer death for the truths he had discovered.

By betraying his faith in doubt, Brecht argues, Galileo also betrayed a new age of reason in which scientists would control their own discoveries for the good of common humanity. This is rather naive because it assumes that people alter power rather than that power alters people. It leads Brecht into his customary fallacy of assuming that power is good in the hands of workers and scientists and bad in the hands of statesmen, clerics and generals. As a historical determinist, Brecht curiously calls for a needless martyrdom. With or without Galileo's recantation, an age of science was inevitable.

After a series of ill-starred ventures, the Lincoln Center company has put together a creditable production, and it is luckiest of all in its British star, Anthony Quayle. His Galileo leaps at the tantalizing bait of new knowledge, delivers his lines with a purity that makes diction a diadem, and knows bitterly the heart's blind wounds for which the mind has no tourniquet.

Puntila and His Hired Man, unlike Galileo, resembles a journey without a destination. In Brecht, dramatic conflict does not resolve itself in tragedy as a death struggle between good and evil, but in irony as a life struggle between irreconcilable divisions in the human psyche itself.

The play is being given by the Milwaukee Repertory Theater as part of an enterprisingly varied season that has included Sophocles' Electra and Noel Coward's Design for Living. The company displays more stamina than sparkle and sometimes throws itself at the play as well as into it, but Director Robert Kalfin wisely stresses the drama's pagan good humor rather than its repetitive class dialectics.