The anger spyglass

What a disturbing, contemporary resonance there is about Bertolt Brecht's epic drama of faith, truth and reason, in which that visionary mathematics professor and star-gazer, Galileo Galilei, designs a subversive telescope to challenge the Catholic church's cherished fantasies about the Earth and Sun and eventually recants his heresy. Fear of the Inquisition's instruments of torture undoes him.

David Hare's wittily modernistic version of The Life Of Galileo, premiered and praised at the Almeida in 1994, has inspired director Howard Davies to stage his atmospheric, spectacular production anachronistically, in modern dress. Simon Russell Beale's thrilling Galileo, tieless, in loose shirt and cigarette to hand, has the air of a 21st-century red-brick university professor, up against the tricky authorities. Brecht himself revised the play three times, after Hiroshima stressing the need for the scientist's social responsibility.

Yet the impact of Davies's updating process disconcerted me and I regretted the lack of explanatory Brechtian captions summarising the essence of scene and identifying locations. Something fresh and valuable is, though, achieved.

The controlling 17th-century papacy determined to suppress Galileo's heretical truth about the Earth's subservience to the Sun. The 21st-century alliance of that omnipotent political duo, Bush and Blair, shared similar working methods: President and Prime Minister,with dogmatic insistence, insisted that their "truth" about weapons of mass destruction would do away with all dissenters. Power dresses itself in timeless costumes.

Bunny Christie's magnificent design encloses the action within the framework of a semi-circular dome, open to sky and stars, below which perspectives shift and extend to summon up worlds where authority is found wanting.

In a robing room, Andrew Woodall's new Pope remorselessly abandons his ideals as he is dressed in the trappings of glory. The academic world, in Hare's shaping view, treats ideas as commodities to help create profits. The Catholic Church and its inquisitor in Oliver Ford Davies's imposing shape exude a quietly menacing air of intransigence - not unlike the KGB.

The key to Russell Beale's bearded, bustling Galileo, for whom ideas come with almost sensual allure, is his fury. The emotion masks a sense of disappointment and self-hatred after Galileo betrays himself, his intellect and empirical truth to the Inquisition. Russell Beale, his character ageing into stiff, sad decrepitude, conveys these feelings with a riveting passion that he has never achieved before.

The Life Of Galileo