SOURCE: “Courage and Compromise,” in New Statesman & Society, February 25, 1994, pp. 35-6.

In the following review, Lavender favorably assesses Hare's adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play Galileo.

“It is treason to use Brecht without criticising him,” the east German writer Heiner Müller once said. The very business of making a version of somebody else’s play constitutes an act of criticism. It’s perhaps surprising, then, that in his version of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo at the Almeida Theatre, David Hare has treated the original with such sensitivity (not that the Brecht estate would allow anybody to do a Brecht on Brecht). Perhaps it’s doubly surprising, given the comments Hare made about Brecht in his book Writing Left-Handed, where he accused the German of doctrinaire tediousness.

Many have shared that opinion, which helps explain why the history of Brecht’s plays in Britain is so vexed...