A production, by the Berliner Ensemble with Ernst Busch in the title role, opened in January 1957 at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm and was directed by Erich Engel, with set-design by Caspar Neher.

After immigrating to the United States from Hitler's Germany (with stopovers in various other countries in between, among them the USSR), Brecht translated and re-worked the first version of his play in collaboration with the actor Charles Laughton.

[citation needed] Matej Danter offers a readily-accessible and detailed comparison of the early, the American, and the final German versions.

[8][9] In 2013 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed a new version of the play based on a "pared down" translation by Mark Ravenhill; the Swan Theatre production received a favorable review from the veteran theater critic Michael Billington.

A prospective student, named Ludovico Marsali, tells him about a novel invention, the telescope ("a queer tube thing"), that is being sold in Amsterdam.

He makes plans to seek the sponsorship of the Medici Court in Florence where he hopes to be able to focus more on his writing and research, but his close friend and colleague, Sagredo, pleads with him not to leave Venice since the rest of Italy is dominated by clerics.

His astronomical observations strongly support Nicolaus Copernicus' heliocentric model of the Solar System, which is counter to popular belief, Aristotelian physics and the established doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.

Virginia's years long engagement to Ludovico Marsali, a wealthy young man whom she genuinely loves, is broken because of Galileo's reluctance to distance himself from his unorthodox teachings.

He furthermore publishes his views in vernacular Italian, rather than traditional scientific Latin, thus making his work and conclusions more accessible to the common people, enraging the Church.

The play stays generally faithful to Galileo's science and timeline thereof, but takes significant liberties with his personal life.

The play, written in 1938, also took place in the aftermath of some of the most sensational of the Moscow Trials, where many Old Bolsheviks, considered heroes of the Russian Revolution by many left-wing activists and Communist sympathisers, were suddenly accused, and then themselves confessed, to acts of sabotage, espionage, terrorism, and collaboration with Nazi Germany and other Western capitalist governments.

The bent wooden rail in scene 13 and the discussion that the quickest distance between two points need not be a straight line (though a straight line offers the shortest path, the fastest descent of a rolling ball in fact follows a curve) alludes to Galileo's investigation of the brachistochrone (in the context of the quickest descent from a point to a wall), which he incorrectly believed to be given by a quarter circle.