THEATRE / Hail, the conquering hero - Galileo wins the day

BRITISH playgoers have spent over 30 years trying to like Brecht. On the whole they have failed. The fault is partly that of reviewers of my generation who were forever thrusting him down the public's reluctant throat. Then there was the apparatus of Brechtian production: wonderful as practised by his own company, usually dire when copied by outsiders. The crowning irony is that this arch-enemy of official culture should have turned into the kind of cultural dead-weight whose work you sit through as an act of piety.

Since John Dexter's National Theatre production of The Life of Galileo in 1981, there have been no successful main-stage Brecht revivals in London. He has survived in fringe shows that lacked the resources for conventional staging. Evidently it was necessary to reinvent Brecht. From Anthony Clark's superb mobile version of Mother Courage, recently at the Cottesloe, this seemed to be happening. It continues with the Almeida's Life of Galileo.

The production reassembles the Almeida team - director (Jonathan Kent), adapter (David Hare), and leading actor (Richard Griffiths) - that came together for Pirandello's The Rules of the Game in 1992 - and to immeasurably greater effect. The first thing you notice is that all the Brechtian paraphernalia has gone. No scenic captions, no attendant choir, no crowd. In place of the astronomical carnival showing the people getting drunk on freedom, there is a Punch and Judy booth with a pair of glove-puppet cardinals being biffed on the head. What emerges is an unobstructed narrative line from which all digressions (such as the plague scene) have been removed.

This approach calls two supposedly vital Brechtian components into question: the idea of the people, and not Galileo, as the hero; and the narrative emphasis on the present moment. On the first, the show returns an unequivocal answer. In the hands of Richard Griffiths this is overwhelmingly Galileo's play. On the second, it's worth remembering that Brecht wrote the piece in several versions over a span of 18 years, partly in response to the Nazi tyranny which he resisted, and partly to the Stalinist tyranny which he approved. No version I had seen managed to reconcile Galileo I, the unfettered scientist seeking knowledge wherever it may lead, and the post-atomic Galileo II, a broken old man for whom science's only legitimate goal is the relief of human hardship.

On the Almeida stage the fable is released into a life of its own. A man of unbounded genius and ambition pits himself against the forces

of his time, sacrificing his personal security and his daughter's happiness to the cause of reason, and then discovers that he is a coward. You can moralise this spectacle in all kinds of ways. You can see it as a Trotskyite allegory; as a warning against the impotence of reason; as a demonstration that suffering is more likely to crack the rationalist than the religious bigot.

These and other meanings are contained in Griffiths's performance, which reconciles all contradictions in a beautifully clean line from confidence to despair. He mocks Aristotle with posh vowels, cheats his Venetian employers, treats his daughter with offhand indifference. Then comes the recantation scene, and he shambles on like a disgraced little boy, timidly acknowledging his betrayal with a cracked smile. The performance is intensely personal; and at all key moments it transcends the personal - most of all in the final scene. Here, the usual balance of sympathies is readjusted, so that the uncorrupted disciple Andrea (Colin Tierney) comes over as an intellectual bigot, while Griffiths amazingly couples self-loathing with hilarious irony. The show does not fade out with the incriminating spectacle of Galileo wolfing down a greedy dinner. Instead, he sits in heartbroken silence contemplating his own past and the future use to which his work will be put.

Staged (by Tobias Hoheisel) in a sequence of rectilinear spaces within a hemisphere of the night sky, Kent's production unfolds with cool fluency, allowing you to infer the psychological and political subtexts. Nothing hurts more than Cara Kelly's transformation from dependent daughter to stone-faced gaoler. With Alfred Burke, Edward de Souza, and Michael Gough representing the spectrum of Vatican policy, the show is spectacularly well cast. I cannot think why Hare has cut the play's best-known line - 'To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster' - but in all other respects, this is the most eloquent English version I have seen. A triumph.

Aristotle bites the dust again at the end of Jakob Lenz's The New Menoza, where a theatre-loving father thrashes his theorising son for giving him rules for 'how I'm to enjoy myself'. Until then Lenz himself has been making hay with the three unities in this 1776 extravaganza. It features a Saxon burgher whose estate is invaded by an Asian prince, a fugitive count, and an imperious Latin beauty thirsting for revenge and played to the point of Castilian meltdown by the wonderful Deborah Findlay. There are other entertaining performances in David Fielding's production, but the style of the piece has eluded him. Before we can laugh at its flights into the theatrical absurd, it needs to be anchored in some kind of normality. As it is, there is plenty of satiric vigour, but no evident target. At least Meredith Oakes's translation does justice to this fascinating playwright.

In Sarah Daniels's The Madness of Esme and Shaz, a retired Christian lady provides a home for her baby-slaying niece on release from a psychiatric hospital. By the end of the play, Jesus and Broadmoor are both forgotten as the liberated pair make off for Lesbos with a carrier- bag full of folding money. As always, this author can tell a story and write effective acting parts (Marlene Sidaway and Tanya Ronder are excellent partners in Jessica Dromgoole's production). And, as always, plot and characters become shipwrecked on sexual politics. No men appear in the piece, but Esme and Shaz have both been damaged by their fathers: and now they are battling against a man- made bureaucracy. Its representatives, however, are women, and in Daniels's world all women are fundamentally OK. So every collision ends with the authority figure acknowledging the bond of sisterhood and caving in. This is a good deal further from reality than anything envisaged by Lenz.

At the tiny Camden Studio, Racine's Andromaque appears in modern dress and slovenly English in a determinedly street-cred production by Jon Harris. I was soon irritated by John Peters's Mafia-boss Pyrrhus and Adrienne Swan's brattishly whining Hermione. Then the Racinian mechanism engaged, stretching these apparently callow figures on the rack. Suffering makes them grow up. Every renunciation inflames their desire. Quiet delivery, commonplace language only reinforce the sense of emotional extremity. Finally the mad Orestes delivers a deadpan welcome to the Furies:

they will torment him less than Hermione. By this time I was in tears.

Mr Harris and his team know what they are doing.

'Galileo': Almeida, 359 4404. 'New Menoza': Gate, 229 0706. 'Madness of Esme and Shaz': Royal Court Upstairs, 730 2652. 'Andromaque': Camden Studio, 794 0022. All nos 071-.