Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives

30 January 2008

Tim Walker talks to the theatrical veterans Roy Dotrice and Patrick Garland about their long-awaited return to the work of John Aubrey

The pair will clearly be making something of a statement with their wonderfully old-fashioned play, and, as for the soap stars, they have seen their like before. ‘The temptation has always been there to put television people on to the stage,’ says Dotrice. ‘I remember Peter Hall telling me up at Stratford that he’d seen a young actor who he thought would make a great Horatio and then, when he auditioned him, he found he couldn’t wear the costume, couldn’t walk the walk, couldn’t project. The fact is, without that theatre training, it’s difficult for them.’ Garland, for his part, believes theatre audiences will soon rediscover their appetite for proper actors in proper plays. ‘These are always the plays that have something to say to them,’ he says. ‘That’s all Roy and I want to do — to communicate with an audience.’ The two men are often surprised by how Brief Lives changed so many lives permanently. Garland read in the Daily Telegraph how the late Hugh Massingberd, as the newspaper’s former obituaries editor, decided to try to illuminate the lives of great men through gossip and anecdote after seeing how well Aubrey had done it during the show’s original run.

Dotrice recalls a middle-aged couple coming up to him on a railway station in 1969. ‘They told me they had seen the play just before they had planned to emigrate to New Zealand. They realised they couldn’t possibly leave the country because to do so would be to deny their history and their past. They decided to stay in this country as a result of seeing the play.’

Garland says that he and Dotrice both know that the play is good and sometimes that has to be enough. ‘I remember writing to Olivier to say how much I regretted my production of Cyrano had not got better reviews,’ he recalls. ‘Olivier replied that some of his greatest work had been torn to pieces by the critics and the public. And lots of work that he knew to be rubbish had been praised to the skies. Sometimes there is just no accounting for taste. More wise words for a younger man from one much older.’