One of the things drama does for you is that it helps you make connections between problems in the play and the ones in your own society bringing them to your notice. Hedda Gabler had already introduced me to the repressed side of woman sexuality and how Hedda crumpled under its weight and her own denial of it. It also dealt with the fact that people don't always accept what they don't understand. Hedda was an anomaly in the time Ibsen wrote the play and many critics were in horror of such a woman even existing. But the fact is, that although now women are less repressed in western society, I saw how that 18th century Norwegian woman was still a reality in many parts of the world.
Therefore, perhaps it was not unusual for me to connect Life of Galileo with the world of today. The point that interested me was not the real message of the play, but I found it important. What I saw most clearly was people's refusal to use their eyes and see things from a wider perspective. Galileo has discovered that the earth is not the centre of the universe; he has proof; but what stumps him is that his proof is of no use unless people choose to acknowledge it. Human reason was what had pushed Galileo towards discovery - the belief that man will reason and move forward with the evidence of his own eyes - and reason let him down. In Scene 4 we see how Galileo invites the scholars of the Venetian court to view his invention and with it his theory on the movement of the planets (Galileo presented the theory that the planets revolved around the sun - not the earth). With the scholars' refusal to even glance through the telescope and see the evidence with their own eyes, Galileo is defeated before he even started. It is just this obstinate refusal to look, to understand and to give others a chance that I still see around the world.
