The sun is shining on a bopping Galileo . . .

Life Of Galileo (Young Vic, London) Verdict: Moves Heaven and Earth ★★★✩✩

DIRECTOR Joe Wright is best known for his Keira Knightley films Atonement, Pride And Prejudice and Anna Karenina.

Here, though, Wright drops in on London’s hippest theatre to direct a hefty production of Bertolt Brecht’s play about the Renaissance astronomer who challenged 17th-century papal authority by proving the Earth orbited the Sun.

Designer Lizzie Clachan turns the theatre into a planetarium, the ceiling converted to a celestial dome, with wheeling / animations of the cosmos.

Add to this some comically bombastic Close Encounters Cosmic: Brendan Cowell (left) as Galileo with Billy Howle moments — with moving rigs, blinding lights, dry ice and masonry shaking music when we meet the Pope — and it’s a coup de theatre on steroids.

Aussie actor Brendan Cowell is a perfect fit for Galileo: a corpulent beardie torn between his appetites and his intellect.

There is something of the modern-day kidult about him here, with his trainers, black jeans, solar system T-shirt and aviator shades.

When he goes to a party at the Vatican, Galileo bops to rave music and eagerly launches himself into a carnival, where he is hailed as a Bible buster. But his clammy, pink-faced charisma becomes a bludgeon in his war on ignorance and denial.

Paul Hunter adds lighter touches as one of Galileo’s excitable disciples — and later as a creepy inquisitor all too reminiscent of Peter Mandelson.

Billy Howle threatens to burst a blood vessel as Galileo’s protege, furious at his master for selling out, and one of the most memorable moments comes courtesy of Brian Pettifer, as the pot-bellied pontiff.

Over the course of three hours, I could have done with more nuance, but it’s still a bold collective effort that does, now and then, make the Earth move.