Brief Lives is a British play about John Aubrey, a 17th-century Englishman who met and kept accounts of many of the famous men of his day, including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and Christopher Wren.
[2] The play came out of an episode about Aubrey in Famous Gossips (1965), the BBC television series Garland made with Alan Bennett.
[3] The play was profiled in the William Goldman book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway.
It then ran at the John Golden Theater in New York City, and had a 400 performance run at the Criterion Theatre in London.
[4] Outside of Broadway and the West End, the play was produced at Canada's Stratford Festival in 1980 with Douglas Rain as Aubrey.