PHILOSOPHER, scientist, antiquarian, gossip, and scourge of aristocrats, mountebanks, bishops, and hapless clerics, John Aubrey was born at Easton Piers (or Piercey), near Chippenham, Wiltshire, on St Gregory’s Day 1625, “Christened before Morning Prayer, as like to die”, he was to become one of the most celebrated English diarists.
Schooled in Dorset with Sir Walter Ralegh’s “boisterous” sons, Aubrey was a student during the English Civil War. He eyed Charles I, “a model of courtesy”, at supper, and hob-nobbed with the king’s “unpolished and unmannered” retinue in Royalist Oxford, where he had become a “gentleman commoner” at the age of 15.
Having no truck with “Oliver Cromwell, the Attila of England”, Aubrey became a Fellow of the Royal Society, saw James II exiled and William and Mary enthroned. and died two years after Purcell, in 1697. He is buried at St Mary Magdalen’s, Oxford.
In 1967, the writer Patrick Garland and the actor Roy Dotrice won acclaim for Brief Lives, a one-man show based on John Aubrey’s memories and jottings, which had audiences in stitches on both sides of the Atlantic. Dotrice got into the Guinness Book of Records for his 1782 solo performances.
Now, 40 years on, the pair have revived the show. Dotrice, the father of Michelle Dotrice, Frank Spencer’s wife in the 1970s sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours, and is now in his 80s — a decade more than Aubrey ever achieved. Staging Brief Lives, which Aubrey noted down between 1669 and 1696, requires stamina.
Dotrice characterises Aubrey to perfection as a scrofulous septuagenarian, shuffling around a darkened, candelit stage in a shabby hair robe and smutty nightshirt, ranting at his neighbours in a Jacobean tenement. He hauls dusty tomes from a precarious library (“I was drawn from my earliest years to a love of antiquities”), chuckles incessantly, clumsily sups wine (“a cure for the worms”), and ejects half-boiled milk with the slops from his casement on drunks below.
On a stage full of bric-a-brac —Simon Higlett’s gloriously shambolic design, including a towering four-poster bed — Aubrey yearns for the good old days, “Queen Elizabeth’s time”. Prurient, mischievous, and muddled, Dotrice dispenses venomous anecdotes “not fit to flie abroad”, forever veering off on unpredictable tangents.
A prototype Rousseau, he inveighs against “the tyrannical beating of children, from which many a tender brain do never recover. . . youth should be in-dulged as to all things”. Nevertheless, he suggests, “if they be too naughty, the thumbscrew be applied”.
One dare not whisper what the future Duke of Buckingham got up to in master Hobbes’s lessons, how Sir Jonas Moore cured his sciatica, how a brewer in Southwark came by the petrified innards of the Jesuit martyr William Harcourt, or the tale of Sir Walter, a wench, and a sapling; but, in Garland’s sympathetic and witty version, this text is rarely less than spicy.
As a small boy (“I was eight years old before I knew what theft was”), Aubrey, the future author of Templa Druidum, Monumenta Britannica, and the Natural History of Wiltshire (his unfinished History of Northern Wiltshire was bequeathed to Thomas Tanner, later Bishop of St Asaph) loved to watch the stonemasons at work.
The aim of Garland’s scintillating, racy prattle is, above all, his audience’s delectation; or as Dotrice’s Aubrey has it, “To make you merry, I’ll tell you a story. . .” Brief Lives is joyous, wise, and saucy: for the sake of your sciatica, you would do well to catch it.
Brief Lives is touring. It will be at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, 17-22 March (phone 01753 853888) and the Richmond Theatre, Richmond-upon-Thames, 25-29 March (phone 0870 060 6651); and a transfer to the West End is planned.
www.theatreroyalwindsor.co.uk
www.richmondtheatre.net
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