Play: Orbits

Orbits, a new play by Wally Sewell, was commissioned by the Ealing Autumn Festival to celebrate the 450th anniversary of Galileo’s birth. Directed by Anthony Shrubsall and premiered at the Drayton Court Theatre on 14th October, it tells of the three year collaboration between the radical left wing German playwright Bertold Brecht, a fugitive from Nazi oppression, and the British movie star, Charles Laughton, as they worked on the translation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo, which premiered on Broadway in 1947.

Act One takes place in Charles Laughton’s study in Los Angeles. Edmund Dehn as Laughton playing Galileo is being questioned by Peter Saracen as Brecht playing a relentlessly sinister Grand Inquisitor. The tension builds as we see Galileo at first defending the heliocentric theory that the Earth orbits the sun and then gradually realizing his own danger – the instruments of torture close at hand, but never seen by the audience – recanting and confessing his own heresy. Dehn’s performance is both subtle and terrifying as he depicts Galileo’s gradual realization that scientific truth is not going to be enough to save him in the face of religious bigotry

Act Two, begins four hundred years later. Religious oppression has been replaced by Nazi oppression and we see that in choosing the subject of Galileo, Brecht appears to be justifying his own inability to stand firm in the face of his beliefs. The actors’ roles are reversed. Brecht has now been summoned before the Un-American Activities Committee to defend himself against charges of Communism, and Laughton is coaching him in how to reply to their questioning. The audience sees the same awareness of danger that Galileo felt building in Brecht, who will eventually flee back to Europe two months before his own opening night in order to escape the committee.

The play’s chief message, that the artist’s first duty is to forget about heroism and merely survive, is enhanced by the simplicity of the production and the powerful performances of the two principal actors. This is a truly gripping and thought provoking evening of theatre, as relevant today as it was in Germany in the 1940s or in seventeenth century Rome and one deserving a wider audience.