"An old man in a lovingly recreated 17th century
room is talking to us. He seizes our at first uneasy attention rather
like some ancient mariner, so that he forces on us his stories, garrulous,
often pointless and yet, in total, remarkably descriptive of human frailty.
The stories are frequently almost feeble in their honesty, but the man
can talk, and almost against inclination you find yourself listening.
Perhaps there are only two kinds of people in
the world--those who look forward and those who look back. For the latter,
Aubrey with good-natured although often scandalous stories provides
a field day. For what happens oddly enough before our eyes is the recreation
of a period. Suddenly, in our hands, to touch and feel, is the fabric
of an age. It is a curious feeling -the kind of real sense of time passed
you do not expect to encounter in a playhouse, but rather with the touch
of an old binding in a bookshop or the reading of some half eroded family
inscription on a lichened tombstone. At once 300 years are the bat of
an eye lid and the past surrounds us like a still-fugitive mist.
This strange event was certainly Mr. Garland's
idea, but it is Roy Dotrice's triumph. Mr. Dotrice, a former member
of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, is an actor of total intensity.
He seems to be Aubrey, and we see giggle; the relaxed manner, the straggly
hair, the old, rheumy eyes, the slightly palsied hand are no longer
matters of acting but the dimensions and lineaments of a person.
Mr. Dotrice is so fine, and Mr. Aubrey so humane,
that I found an evening in their company both entertaining and,
as the
shadows deepened, suggesting the long, frail night, sharply moving."
...from a review of the original production in the New York Times
From the opening credits of "Brief Lives"
performed
by Rob Bowers.
"John Aubrey also wrote Miscellanies (1696), a collection
of stories and folklore, the Natural History of Wiltshire (edited
by John Britton, 1847), and a Perambulation of Surrey. His
most important contribution to the study of British antiquities, the
lengthy and discursive Monumenta Britannica, remains in manuscript.
A scheme was afoot in 1692 to publish the manuscript, and a prospectus
and a specimen page were issued in 1693, but nothing more came of
the project. It contains the results of Aubrey's field-work at Avebury
and Stonehenge and notes on many other ancient sites, including Wayland's
Smithy. Apparently the original title of the manuscript was to
be Templa Druidum.
Aubrey, in 1648, at the age of 22, while out hunting with some friends
near Avebury
in Wiltshire, recognized in the earthworks and great stones placed
about the landscape in and about the village a great prehistoric temple.
In the following century, William
Stukeley was to develop the claim that Avebury was an ancient
cult centre of the Druids.
In addition to his 'discovery' of the Avebury complex, Aubrey is
also remembered for his inclusion in a plan of Stonehenge
in his Monumenta Britannica of a series of slight depressions
immediately inside the enclosing earthwork. Curiously, Stukeley does
not record them in his painstaking examination of the site, and it
was not until excavations undertaken in 1921-25 by the Society of
Antiquaries that they were found to be holes cut in the chalk to hold
timber uprights. A total of 56 holes were discovered and named the
Aubrey Holes in honour of John Aubrey's observation.
These holes are now recognized as belonging to the first phase of
the monument's construction." ...from "Earth
Mysteries" Chris
Witcombe - Sweet Briar
College
...Aubrey's Lives continue in other incarnations.
An LP record album of "Brief Lives" with Roy Dotrice
was produced during the play's original run as was a paperback
edition by Patrick Garland.
In 1990, Australian actor and director Rod Wissler took Garland's
adaptation on a world tour for a two-year run.
The Malaysian troupe "Instant Cafe Theatre Company" performed "Brief
Lives" in Kuala Lumpur in 1997.
Garland's play again opened in London in 1998
starring Michael Williams
In 2008 Roy Dotrice revives "Brief Lives" in a new
tour.
In October 1999, a new
audio tape/ cd based on the book was released, read by Brian Cox
with music by Gibbons, Early English Organ Music (Payne), and Purcell:
"Wlliam Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hobbes - three
of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. They, and many others,
are here remembered by another great Englishman, John Aubrey, whose
Brief Lives are some of the wittiest and most moving miniature portraits
ever written. Aubrey - a scholar, antiquarian and close observer of
both the foibles and the courage of his contemporaries - lived through
the upheavals of the English Civil War in the 17th century. His little
biographies are amusing, ribald, moving; a testament to the brevity
of human existence and one of the most precious relics of a distant
age."
