The audience files into the theatre taking their seats around — and in fact on — the circular stage. The staging is minimal: a few chairs, a lamp/telescope-stand and a rickety staircase along the periphery of the stage. Electronic music, written by Tom Rowlands of Chemical Brothers fame, blares through the speakers as the actors dance around, pumping up the audience. Brendan Cowell — our Galileo for the evening and until 1 July — announces ‘Scene 1’. A short puppet show sets the stage and we find Galileo in his house discussing with Andrea, his housekeeper's son and trusted student, Copernicus's heliocentric system. Soon thereafter Galileo builds his first telescope, following news of such a contraption being sold in the Netherlands, and it's not much later that he points it to the sky. At that moment, the planetarium-like screen overhanging the stage lights up with a starry night sky and then the Moon with its many craters, valleys and mountains.
Galileo realizes that the Moon is not that different from Earth. In the next scene he observes Jupiter's moons, which he names the Medici stars to appease the local lords. More importantly he realizes that they are orbiting around Jupiter. This movement is proof that Copernicus was indeed right and the ‘divine’ Aristotle's idea that stars are fixed atop ‘crystal spheres’ must be incorrect. This inadvertently brings Galileo in conflict with the Catholic Church and leads to his incarceration by the Inquisition, the infamous recantation of his work and eventually his death under house arrest in Arcetri, Italy in 1642.
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