Life of Galileo, Belvoir

I'll be honest, this was the one I was most marginal on in this year's Belvoir Subscription. The combination of the director of one of my least liked productions of last year and the adapter of another of my least liked production last year (both, incidentally, have left those shows off their bios for this year) uniting, on a play I've seen already (albeit 23 years ago in a very glossy Richard Wherrett production at the STC)? Still, it's a play I remember liking, an oddly intimate epic covering the emergence of Galileo as a scientific mind at the same time as it looks at his struggles against the church to continue his work. It's by no means an easy hagiography - Galileo is no science-for-science's-sake genius, he's always looking for ways to sell his ideas (from the military application of the telescope to see the enemy before they see you, to the financial benefits of starcharts that can allow navigation further from shore) - and he's not above a little chicanery (in particular in stealing the idea of the telescope from a young student's report of seeing it developed in Holland).

Eamon Flack directs this in the round, using a simple wooden stage with the occasional assistance of a cosmological model flown in from the roof and a chair. Tom Wright's adaptation is a tight distillation, occasionally a little too much so (there's one or two scenes that feel chopped off at the end), and a little too keen to signal the contemporary resonances with a key phrase or two. But dammit, this does move pretty well.

Colin Friels as the lead has the shifty, inquisitive wheeler-dealer type to a T - he's pragmatic, cunning, and just about smart enough to get away with his beliefs until the inquisition catches up with him. The supporting roles have a fine mix of performers, from Vaishnavi Suryaprakash as his closest follower Andrea, almost more dedicated to his cause than he is himself, to Peter Carrol shifting through a range of roles up to and including the pope, as imprisoned by his role as Galileo is by his. Some of the roles feel slightly squeezed in the trimming (Laura McDonald as Galileo's daughter, Virginia, in particular - I do remember her case for living an undisturbed life getting slightly more prominent presentation in the STC version) - and there's a few instances of fourth-wall breaking that feel like they should be building to more than they actually do. But in general, this is a solid rather than a remarkable presentation of an interesting text - but at least it'ts still interesting.