La Vie de Galilée ・ Comédie-Française

Almost thirty years after the last production of "Life of Galileo" at the Comédie-Française, which also marked the text’s entry into the Repertoire, Éric Ruf is interested in what the play has to say regarding the fundamental necessity of doubt.

“Today, 10 January 1610, mankind writes in its diary: Galileo abolishes heaven”: accompanied by a pupil, the mathematician Galileo studies the firmament through his telescope. Ten years earlier, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned in Rome for having maintained, on the basis of Copernicus’ work, that we live in an infinite and centreless universe. Through observation and calculation, Galileo seeks evidence for his hypothesis of a cosmic system in which the Earth is “an ordinary celestial body, one of thousands”. From Padua to Venice, the mathematician undermines certainties by confronting the power of a Church that wishes to hold onto its absolute power over the “crystal spheres” in which Ptolemy had contained the world up to that point. Galileo’s discoveries about astronomy and physics fascinate the people but the scientist recants under the threat of torture. The Inquisition got the better of him, but not of his science.
In this play, which has been described as prophetic – Brecht began writing it while in exile in Denmark in 1938 and finished it in 1955, the complexity of Galileo’s character stands out, as noted by Antoine Vitez: “I need neither to save him nor not to save him, I only need to show him.” Almost thirty years after its last production at the Comédie-Française, which also marked the text’s entry into the Repertoire, Éric Ruf follows Vitez by focusing on what the play has to say regarding the fundamental necessity of doubt. For this ensemble play in fifteen tableaux, he is reunited with Hervé Pierre, an “actor-world” who was his Peer Gynt in 2012. Far from treatise or simplification but embracing knowledge, credulity, faith, ethics and science, this portrait spanning a long trajectory in a man’s life, expresses the paradoxes of the conquest of the mind.

NEW PRODUCTION
With the patronage of Allianz France

Creative team

Staging and s****cenography: Éric Ruf
Translation: Éloi Recoing
Costumes: Christian Lacroix
Lights: Bertrand Couderc
Original music: Vincent Leterme
Sound: Colombine Jacquemont
Choreographic work: Glysleïn Lefever
Artistic collaboration****: Léonidas Strapatsakis
Assistant stage manager: Alison Hornus
Assistant scenography: Julie Camus
Assistant costumes: Jean Philippe Pons
Assistant lights: Lila Meynard

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