Home > The Magazine > Features

Saturday 22 November 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Two old stagers find vigour in Brief Lives

Tim Walker

Wednesday, 30th 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.’

Previous page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

More articles from: Tim Walker | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Thank goodness we can have a run on the pound when we need one

Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer looks ahead to next week’s Pre-Budget Report and reflects on George Osborne’s contentious remarks about the devaluation of sterling. It looks like Gordon Brown is getting away with his borrowing binge — leaving the Tories isolated

I loved Oliver Stone’s Bush film — and I know why the critics hated it

Rod Liddle

The movie W. did not provide the crude anti-Bush agitprop that the reviewers craved, says Rod Liddle. This was precisely its strength: we need to get inside the minds even of those we most deplore

The great Tory tax and spend battle: seconds out...

Fraser Nelson and Daniel Finkelstein

In the wake of Cameron’s decision to drop his pledge to match Labour spending, Fraser Nelson and Daniel Fin kelstein of the Times trade rhetorical blows over the issue that is gripping and troubling the Conservative party as it adjusts to the transformed economic context

Where is our inspiration when we most need it?

Bryan Forbes

Bryan Forbes remembers listening to Churchill as a 14-year-old evacuee and now looks with envy at Obama’s capacity to galvanise hope. Where are his UK counterparts?