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High anxiety: Collapse - Riverside Studios

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It’s a brave or maybe slightly provocative production to use Hammersmith Bridge on their artwork for a show called Collapse, which is about how everything collapses—poorly maintained bridges, relationships, and jobs. Nothing works. That’s probably too close to home for Hammersmith residents stuck with a magnificently listed and useless bridge on their front door. It gets even weirder when you realise the piece is staged in what looks like a meeting room with a bar. However, keeping things together in the most unlikely of circumstances is at the heart of Allison Moore's witty and engaging four-hander, which is currently having a limited engagement at Riverside Studios . The piece opens with Hannah (Emma Haines) about to get an injection from her husband (Keenan Heinzelmann). They’re struggling for a baby, and he’s struggling to get out of bed. But he managed to give her a shot of hormones before she started worrying about the rest of the day. She’s unsure she will keep her job with ...

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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