| Magnificently entertaining |
Brief Lives |
| Adapted and directed by Patrick Garland - on tour , Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Mold , September 19, 2008 |
Welcome to the none too tidy London home of John Aubrey, historian, antiquarian and gossip. It’s the 1690s and Aubrey, the real life writer after whom the Aubrey Holes at Stonehenge are named, is an old man living off his memories of life before the war, the English Civil War that is.I was being polite by calling it none too tidy, in Simon Higlett’s towering and fantastically detailed set the books may be on the shelves but everything else is on tables, chairs and floor, and the mess is so convincing you’d swear you could smell it. Through this chaos shuffles an aged, bearded man in an astonishingly distressed dressing gown. Aubrey’s best known book was and still is, Brief Lives, a collection of short biographical essays, not noted for their historical accuracy but still highly readable for the author’s waspish tongue and for his delight in reporting any oddity or scandal, no matter how unlikely. In the 1960’s Patrick Garland felt that the book could be turned into a show, so alive was the authorial voice. Roy Dotrice, then in his 40s, had an enormous success with the result, playing it in the West End and on Broadway so often that he made it into the Guinness Book of Records for the greatest number of solo performances, 1,782. It was a formidable role by any standards so what must it be like for him to return to it now that he’s in his 80s? The answer is that I don’t know because I didn’t see an actor of any age on the stage in Mold, instead I saw John Aubrey doing what he does best, talking, remembering, cackling (such a wicked cackle) and holding his audience spellbound for two hours. His often rambling musings covered many subjects, two-headed babies, scientific experiments, sexual organs and where they were placed and much else besides. It was all related with great glee, gusto and not a little earthy language. There was a lot of humour, much of it concerned with bodily functions, some melancholy, often connected with age and death and several attempts to eat or drink, usually thwarted by the age of the food or beverage. The play and the performance became something of a legend in the ‘60s and 70s. Now I’ve experienced the legend and it was even better than I could have hoped for. Just to feel the perfection of Roy Dotrice’s, or rather John Aubrey’s, comic timing would have been joy enough but there’s so much more to this wonderful play than that. A theatrical legend indeed, and a magnificently entertaining one too. |
Reviewed by: Victor Hallett |
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