Documentation > Archives past Seasons > The Past Seasons > Season 2007- 2008

There is a Galileo myth. According to popular legend, along with Copernicus, he is one of the founding martyrs of modern knowledge. As for the Church that condemned him, it embodies the obscurantism of dogma and authority. Except that Jean-François Peyret (who has done a close reading of Brecht, and who has taken enough of an interest in science in order to co-sign his plays with the neurobiologist Alain Prochiantz), interprets something completely different in Galileo's destiny. He unravels and deciphers the arrival of science-as-passion (as one might speak of passionate love), the desire to see-know-act, to take control of the universe, even if it means being controlled by those in power, down here, in this world. And as well, between faith and reason, Peyret is going to offer us other characters, just in order to complicate the debate : that of the wary wise man (Olivier Perrier), Epicurus's swine, flanked by his sow, whose ironic goal will be to observe the observer ; but also that of Galileo's daughter, the emotionally stirring Virginia (played by Jeanne Balibar), a worthy Antigone, of this Oedipus who ignores who he is...