Though he’s always been drawn to political drama, Michael McCall finds it unusual that it’s taken him 25 years into his career to work on a piece by iconic German playwright, Bertolt Brecht.
He’s finally doing just that with a production of “A Life of Galileo”, with a cast of WAAPA second year acting students. It may have taken time, but as with Brecht’s works, it is both timely and timeless.
“The thing that drives me to Brecht is that he leaves his plays as unfinished business,” McCall explains. “They’re not museum pieces. They might be historical allegories there for whoever comes at any particular time in their own historical context to be able to read into them and to see that the strange thing about history is that, yes, it repeats itself, but it’s never inevitable.
“And that’s one of the things that Brecht puts up there. We cannot live in cultural and societal and political narratives that we believe the world will go in a certain direction if we point in that direction and that will be there.
“And a lot of times we find that quite comforting, I think, as human beings, but Brecht’s challenge was to say just because you see the world a certain way, other people don’t see it that way. And if all we’re going to do is constantly repeat the, for lack of a better term, propaganda, or I suppose the cultural mythology of the times we’re living in, then we’re not really learning anything.”
Brecht went about his expression with aplomb, combining theatrical technique with his own unique narrative ethos.
“It’s so eclectic; there’s so much movement, song, dance, pop culture, personal politics, relationships… there’s so much going on and it’s fantastic. It’s like Shakespeare, but unlike narrative drama where you have a kind of hero that you follow along, he’s going to say, ‘we live in a world where there’s no heroes. There are just the predicaments that people find themselves in.’
“So what you’re going to find interesting in watching this play – and other things that he wrote – is that we’re going to find out what happens if someone make certain choices and how that changes them and how it changes the world around them.”
“A Life of Galileo” focuses on the inquisition 17th-century Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei – ‘The Father of Modern Medicine’ – faced when he backed the assertion by Polish astronomer Copernicus that the earth orbits the sun. This put him at odds with the Church and the then-dominant religious and social order, and there were to be consequences. At the same time, Galileo’s growing celebrity also impacted the proceedings, much in the same way that both mainstream and social media cloud the real issues of the present day in fame and notoriety.
“You start off with integrity,” McCall notes. “You have something you want to explore, something you want to say. And it’s important to you and that’s your natural focus, and it’s about trying to let people know, ‘This is what the world is about. This is what I’m about and I want you to hear my message very quickly through the celebrity side of things.’
It’s not selling out; it’s just that lots of people become enamoured with what you have to say. You suddenly find yourself getting a lot of notoriety and people gifting you things and perhaps rewarding you commercially for what you have put forward into the world.
“And so, you start to maybe buy into your own press. After that, you’re in a lot of trouble if they suddenly walk away from you. And you suddenly find yourself at a moment in time when the person or the construct of the person is no longer there. So they then deal with that and that’s when they can go wrong. Whether you’re a pop star, scientist or celebrity, like Galileo, you can suddenly start to feel as though the world is turning against you.”
McCall cites figures such as J. Robert Oppenheimer and more recently Dr. Anthony Fauci, who both changed from hero to villain in plain sight of the world.
“We see all the way through history, this constant kind of challenge or dilemma that scientists have with the amazing work that they come up with,” he says.
“There’s potentially always going to be a backlash. And when we go back into the 1600s of Galileo, what we start to realise is that for people at that time, it’s almost as though they’re watching magic. And when they see that sort of thing that people were coming up with during the enlightenment, things that were natural or from God who put things there, all of a sudden that belief was being undermined.”
Brecht originally wrote “A Life of Galileo” for English actor Charles Laughton to make into a movie that never ended up happening (it was staged theatrically in 1947 at the Cornet Theatre in Hollywood), but it retains an episodic structure as a result. Add to that his fascination with the cabaret culture of the Weimar Republic and it makes for a production that is comprehensive and eclectic.
“A lot of music has been composed and is played by the students,” McCall says. “It was all concocted over the last several weeks by them. It just sounds fantastic. There’s other music there’s that in there for more contemporary times, such as Radiohead. So you’ve got a lot of different things coming together that, in some ways, it’s historical, but in other ways, it’s a nod to the history of Brecht.”
McCall is over the moon about the WAAPA second year cast; his feeling is that a golden era is emerging. It’s a challenging piece in many ways, but they’re more than up to the task that has been set.
“There’s a lot of movement in the piece, a lot of physical theatre. Brecht was very much about, ‘If you can see it in movement, then why not see it in movement?’
“There’s dance in there. There’s a lot of comedy, there’s a cabaret that pops up in the piece as well. So it’s got something for everybody. For people who, if they’ve not seen Brecht before – because it’s not always done a lot – I think they’re going to be blown away by it. It’s a real theatrical tour de force the students have put together.”
As for what audiences will take away from “A Life of Galileo”, McCall says there are multitudes, but just don’t expect any answers.
It’s unfinished business, after all.
“It’s not for us as a company to say the way you live your life or what you believe in or how you align yourself politically, is right or wrong,” he offers. “Our job is to give you those questions, and for you to go into that foyer, and have a glass of wine if that’s all you want. But by all means, leave the theatre and start a revolution.”
“A Life Of Galileo”
Written by Bertolt Brecht / Translated by Mark Ravenhill
Directed by Michael McCall
Performed by WAAPA second year acting students
Tickets: $40 Full / $35 Concession / $33 Friends
Full details at waapa.ecu.edu.au
Thu 9 to Wed 15 November at 7.30pm, matinee Sat 11 November at 2.00pm
Dolphin Theatre, University of Western Australia
