There’s a fabulous scene in Eamon Flack’s production of Life of Galileo in which the new Pope Urban VIII (Peter Carroll) is dressed by his staff. Gradually the wizened, elderly man is clothed, layer by layer by layer, in his symbolic, papal regalia until he has been transformed into the supreme head of the Catholic church.

Peter Carroll and Vaishnavi Suryaprakash. Photograph © Brett Boardman

Meanwhile, the Cardinal Inquisitor (Damien Ryan), gets into his ear about Galileo. The Pope maintains that you can’t use Galileo’s ideas and then condemn him, but to no avail. The Pope may be a former mathematician but he cannot deny the Inquisition, and his fear, frustration, even bewilderment at the situation he finds himself in is abundantly plain in Carroll’s vulnerable expression. It is one of the highlights of the starkly staged production.

Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo follows the story of the great Italian astronomer, mathematician, physicist and engineer Galileo Galilei, moving from Padua in 1609 to Arcetri in Tuscany in 1637 where he died under house arrest, having been found “vehemently suspect of heresy” by the Inquisition. His crime was to champion Copernicus’s new cosmogony of Heliocentrism,...