Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Read Free Page A

was needed apart from the addition of the passage about ‘a universal cry of fear’ in the penultimate scene. The notion of a Hippocratic oath for scientists had still to be worked in. So before leaving the US Brecht drafted the relevant passage (see p. 270), which could indeed have been in his mind from the inception of the play, the idea itself having been put forward by Lancelot Law White in
Nature
in 1938 and discussed at the time in an editorial in the
New York Times
.
    On 1 December 1945 the new, ‘American’ text was complete enough for Laughton to read it to the Brechts, Eisler, Reichen-bach, Salka Viertel and other friends. About a week later he also read it to Orson Welles, whom both he and Brecht seem already to have had in mind for some while as the right director for the production towards which they were working. Welles instantly accepted the job, and a few days after that the three men saw Laughton’s agents Berg-Allenberg to discuss whether to open in the spring or the summer. This question was bound up with their choice of producer, which seems to have veered initially between Welles himself, the film impresario Mike Todd and Elisabeth Bergner’s husband Paul Czinner, for whom Brecht was already working on the
Duchess of Malfi
adaptation. Czinner was not congenial to Laughton, and once the idea of a spring production was abandoned he dropped out. Welles for his part apparently disliked Brecht; nevertheless for a time the intention was that he and Todd should combine forces; then a mixture of uncertainty about dates and dislike of the kind of teamwork proposed by Laughton and Brecht made Welles drop out after the middle of 1946, leaving Todd as sole producer. After that various directors were suggested: Elia Kazan, who had a particular appeal for Brechtbecause he did not claim to know all the answers; Harold Clurman, whom Brecht respected as ‘an intelligent critic and interested in theoretical issues’ but saw primarily as a ‘Stanislavsky man’ unlikely to let him have any say. He even inquired about Alfred Lunt. Meantime a great deal of detailed revision of the new Brecht—Laughton text went on, with Brecht and Reyher totally overhauling it in New York, then Laughton and Brecht again reworking it in California. Versions of the ballad-singer’s song were made by Reyher and by Abe Burrows (of
Guys and Dolls
fame) while the inter-scene verses seem to have involved a whole host of collaborators including Brecht himself and his daughter Barbara; the only programme credit, however, for the ‘lyrics’ went to a Santa Monica poet called Albert Brush. The eventual director chosen was Joseph Losey, who had met Brecht in Moscow in 1935 and thereafter made his name with the Living Newspaper programmes of the Federal Theatre. Finally Todd too dropped out after offering (in Losey’s words) to ‘dress the production in Renaissance furniture from the Hollywood warehouses’, an idea that was unacceptable to Brecht, Laughton and Losey alike. With this the hope of any kind of production in 1946 disappeared.
    Briefly Brecht hoped that he and Losey might be able to stage a try-out at Berkeley under the auspices of Henry Schnitzler, son of the Austrian playwright, but time was too short. Instead the three partners decided to turn to a new smaller management headed by Norman Lloyd and John Houseman, who were then about to take over the Coronet Theatre on La Ciénega Boulevard, Los Angeles. They agreed to put on
Galileo
as their second production, with the ‘extremely decent’ (said Brecht) T. Edward Hambleton as its principal backer. Though Brecht was unable to get his old collaborator Caspar Neher over from Europe as he wished, the substitute designer Robert Davison accepted his and Laughton’s ideas for an unmonumental, non-naturalistic setting; Helene Weigel helped with the costumes. Eisler (who actually preferred the first version of the play) wrote the music in a fortnight; Lotte Goslar did the