Theatre
Old things ))}
Kenneth Hurren
I am not, on the whole, fanaticallY attracted by monologuists, but I'll make a ready exception of ROY Dotrice and his show, Brief Lives, which he first presented about five years ago and which has turned up again at the May Fair Theatre, Dotrice puts on such a hypnotic display in his disguise as the seventeenth-century biographer, and diarist, John Aubrey, that I even stayed in my seat to watch him during the interval when foregoing the opportunity to leave the stage and fortify himself for the second half, he subsides into, an old man's doze, nodding an sighing and twitching, centre' stage, in a chair that is part of the sumptuously cluttered decay that Julia Trevelyan Oman Ms designed to represent Mistress Byerley's lodging-house in Dirty Lane. It is here that Aubrey discovered in 1697, the last year oi his life, scandalously and slyIY eager to reminisce. The lusts and indiscretions of a bygone age are not the most aus" picious subjects for anecdotage, the capacity of gossip to divert or outrage being quite directly relat: ed to the recipient's familiaritY with its victims, and if there we,rei no more to Aubrey than his trivia tittle-tattle about, say, the Rale.101 family, he would not now be being compared to Pepys and EvelYn' Nor would Patrick Garland, v/n adapted the material for the present entertainment from old rascal's letters, memoirs arr„ assorted jottings, have been all: to provide Dotrice with such ° richly satisfying text. AubreYt,'" scholarly wit and an acute 0.", server of the changing soclai; scene, has somehow given 115,,.5 more sharply etched portrait of n'() times than any you're likelY, ti come upon in soberer historicite treatises. It is this, as much as th.c accomplished exercise in geriatrir verisimilitude, that you will savou in Dotrice's performance. Of I begin to think more affablY.,e Jonathan Miller than at anY since he abandoned his promis"R career as a comedian in favour directing. You won't rememberPiii, course, but I was quite taken `1 at his production of The Seaga' A I Chichester last summer, have naturally been glad to that it has been kept together a,cPti is coming into the Green Theatre next week. It willJcioc, there in repertory the good .400 tor's freshly conceived produci; is of Ibsen's Ghosts; and Hamde being added later on. three The idea of grouping these lie, works under the general tl 0 'Family Romances,' strikes trl'arly dubious, ana j aon't thinkeo De useful connections are going `arrie established by casting the
players as Arkadina-Mrs Gertrude (Irene Worth), tantin-Oswald-Hamlet (""
Spectator January 26, 1974 Eyre) and Trigorin-MandersClaudius (Robert Stephens), but we shall see. Meanwhile, Miller has done marvellously with Ghosts, holding a firmly tactful soft-pedal on all its melodramatic excesses, and looking beyond the Syphilis theme to emphasise the broader symbolic significance of the title (though I have as little Patience with the view that OsWald's tragedy is invalidated by the invention of penicillin as I should have with the argument that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is invalidated by the invention of the telephone). The players serve their director's ends impressively, especially Stephens, who, if he cannot quell all the chuckles With which contemporary audiences are apt to greet Pastor Manders's moralising, at least does so to a degree I had thought scarcely possible.
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