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A Man For All Seasons: Seagull True Story - Marylebone Theatre

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It's not often that you see a play that tells you not so much a story but gives you a sense of how it feels to be in a situation, how it feels to be silenced, how it feels to be marginalised, how the dead hand of consensus stifles your creativity. However, in Seagull True Story, created and directed by Alexander Molochnikov and based on his own experiences fleeing Russia and trying to establish himself in New York, we have a chance to look beyond the headlines and understand how the war in Ukraine impacted a a group of ordinary creatives in Russia. And how the gradual smothering of freedom and freedom of expression becomes impossible to resist, except for the brave or the suicidal. Against the backdrop of Chekhov's The Seagull, which explores love and other forms of disappointment, it presents a gripping and enthralling depiction of freedom of expression in the face of adversity. After playing earlier this year in New York, it plays a limited run at the Marylebone Theatre . Fro...

Theatre: The Life of Galileo

Tuesday night I caught The Life of Galileo at the National Theatre. This is a new translation by David Hare of the Bertolt Brecht play. It is an epic story (at three hours and two intervals) but still an engaging tale of how Galileo as a genius in the scientific world was unable to deal with the consequences of his genius. He was a scientist not a politician, but to state that the earth moved around the sun challenged the entire notions of Heaven and Earth so was tantamount to heresy.

Simon Russell Beale as Galileo leads a terrific ensemble as the story unfolds from his scientific discoveries to his condemnation and eventual redemption as his work is smuggled out of Italy. David Hare's translation and the production kept things at a brisk enough pace, although a three hour play after a day at work is a challenge both for the actors and the audience.  It was a packed performance too which just goes to show that Brecht too can be accessible…

By the end of the play the real victory was that science and the pursuit of knowledge did triumph of sorts… But it did take the Catholic Church until 1992 (350 years later) to finally admit Galileo was right…

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