last acted in the theatre in 1934, and since playing Rembrandt in Alexander Korda’s 1936 film of that name (for which Brecht’s old friend Carl Zuckmayer wrote the script) he had had a surfeit of supporting roles in second- and third-rate Hollywood films. During the spring and summer of 1944 he read the rough translation of Brecht’s Schweik in the Second World War and greatly enjoyed it, while Brecht for his part wrote the long poem ‘Garden in Progress’ to commemorate, not without irony, the landslide which sent part of the Laughtons’ beautifully tended garden sliding down the cliff face to the road below. By then the actor had evidently learnt enough about Galileo , whether through Brecht’s description or from the Vesey and Reyher translations, to decide that it might well be the masterpiece to carry him back to the live stage. With Brecht’s agreement h^ now commissioned a fresh translation by a young writer called Brainerd Duffield, who had been working with Alfred Dóblin and other German exiles employed by MGM. By the end of November Duffield and his contemporary Emerson Crocker had once again translated Brecht’s original script and produced a third text which both Laughton and the Brechts evidently approved. A fortnight later actor and playwright together were getting down to what the former terms ‘systematic work on the translation and stageversion of the Life of the Physicist Galileo ’. Whatever the original intention, it was in effect to be a new play. * * * Brecht later called the work with Laughton a ‘zweijáhriger Spass’, a two-year escapade, and undoubtedly it covers more paper than did any other of his writings, so that altogether it represents a prodigal expenditure of both men’s time. But he also saw it as the classic collaboration between a great dramatist and a great actor, and the loving account which he gives in ‘Building up a part’ (p. 206 ff.) seems to have been filtered through a warm Californian haze rather than the wintry greys of Berlin. Inevitably there were long interruptions before a first script was ready. From February to May 1945 Laughton was off playing in the pirate film Captain Kidd (Brecht meantime consoling himself by trying to put the Communist Manifesto into Lucretian hexameters); then in June and July Brecht was in New York for a none too successful production of The Private Life of the Master Race in Eric Bentley’s translation, directed initially by Piscator and finally by Viertel on Brecht’s intervention. Generally however they worked as described by Brecht, with him reshaping the play in a mixture of German and English – his typescript drafts contain many instances of this, of which one is cited on p. 237 – and both men then trying to get the English working right. This reshaping often followed Laughton’s suggestions, which went much further than the basic cutting and streamlining which were his most obvious contribution. Thus it was he who proposed the elimination of the Doppone character (see p. 239), the ‘positive entry’ of the iron founder in scene 2, the argument between Ludovico and Galileo in the sunspot scene and the shifting of the handing-over of the Discorsi so that Galileo’s great speech of self-abasement should come after it and offset it. Brecht too worked to make this self-abasement seem more of a piece with Galileo’s concern for his own comforts, which were now to include thinking. In this, as in the new emphasis on Galileo’s sensuality, he was aided by Laugh-ton’s character, of which Eric Bentley has written that It is unlikely that anyone again will combine as he did every appearance of intellectual brilliance with every appearance of physical self-indulgence. If the 1938 version derived its political relevance from the need to smuggle the truth out of Nazi Germany, this new version was given an extra edge of topicality by the dropping of the first atomic bomb on 6 August 1945. Not that any significant change