The Peter Hall Company's new season kicks off with a fascinating play by Timberlake Wertenbaker based on a book by Dava Sobel. But although it's a humane work about a historically marginalised figure, I feel it wrenches the known facts to suit its own polemical purpose - which, of course, is precisely what Brecht did in his own play on Galileo.
Wertenbaker starts from the fact that Galileo's two illegitimate daughters were committed to a Florentine convent of the Poor Clares. Her focus is less on the neurotic Arcangela than on the devoted Maria Celeste, whose 124 letters to her father still survive. Time and again the scientifically curious Maria assures her father that she loves him next to, and sometimes more than, God. The dramatic crisis stems from Galileo's enforced abjuration in 1633 of his belief in a heliocentric universe: for Wertenbaker's Maria it is a personal, as well as a cosmic, tragedy shattering her faith in her earthly father.
Every writer interprets Galileo's recantation in a different way. Brecht even offered two versions: in one Galileo symbolised the struggle of freedom against tyranny, in the other the abdication of scientific responsibility. But Wertenbaker is primarily concerned with the effect of Galileo's renunciation on Maria. Having first been appalled by her father's intellectual betrayal, Maria learns that a necessary part of love is acknowledging the other's imperfections. In that sense, Wertenbaker's play is both an attack on patriarchal values and a plea for personal tolerance.
All this makes for lively drama: the scenes of separation and reconciliation between daughter and father even acquire echoes of King Lear. But what has this to with historic reality? The fact is that, even after Galileo's abjuration, Maria wrote to her father saying that "it pierces my soul with pain to hear the judgment that has been passed". The real story of Galileo's daughter is one of unmitigated love; Wertenbaker twists the documented facts to turn it into a voyage of discovery.
Oddly enough, her play is at its best in traditional scenes of power politics: in particular, one gripping private encounter between Galileo and Pope Urban in which the latter puts the pragmatic case for persisting with a Ptolemaic view of the universe. "How can I confess to something I don't believe?" asks Galileo. "I do it all the time," replies James Laurenson's suavely convincing Pope. And even if Galileo's final admission that his recantation sprang from a horror of absolutism belies everything he has previously argued, it at least resonates in our own world of clashing fundamentalist certainties.
Wertenbaker has written an intelligent, well-ordered play. Peter Hall directs a production of minimalist elegance played, in true Brechtian tradition, against a dazzling cyclorama. Rebecca Hall confirms her star status by endowing Maria with a mixture of scrubbed piety, intellectual fever and human rattiness, and Julian Glover's Galileo rightly blends scientific curiosity with bloody-minded obduracy.
I was informed and entertained. But I can't help feeling that the reality is even more gripping than Wertenbaker's invention. By that I don't just mean that Sister Maria writes in her letters about a suicidal novice or her financial deals to get a better cell. What her story proves is the power of unblemished love: a subject that may not be inherently dramatic but that transcends Wertenbaker's ingenious reinterpretation.
· Until August 14. Box office: 01225 448844.
