LATE SIXTIES TO EARLY SEVENTIES
NW1; extended families; back to the theatre (Nottingham Playhouse, the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company, the Mermaid and Olivier’s National Theatre)
IN GLOUCESTER CRESCENT, other gatherings with the neighbours generated hallucinatory moments of their own. At somewhat bohemian parties, George Melly’s favourite trick was doing an impression of a bulldog that entailed a stark-naked moonie and satirically rearranged genitalia. In-depth research reveals that the whole tripartite routine was man, woman, bulldog: that’s (a) full frontal; (b) genitals tucked between legs; and (c) the rear view for the grand finale. A witty journalist and expert on surrealist art, as well as a flamboyant jazzman, Melly became great friends with Miller.1 When Ken Tynan broke television’s big taboo, saying ‘fuck’ on air in the mid-1960s, they jointly fired off a congratulatory telegram from the Crescent.2
When the Mellys threw parties, Miller’s humorous conversation usually made the shyer guests relax, though the Belgian surrealist E. L. T. Mesens ended up so confident at one bash that he had to be dragged out of the house, drunkenly yelling that he wanted to box Mark Boxer.3 Conversely, the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, was horrified by the informality. He fled in horror when Miller turned up for supper at the Mellys’ having just visited Scotland Yard’s grisly Black Museum.4 As the host himself fondly recalled:
Jonathan came back and launched into a hysterical description of the exhibits, you know, as the policeman. [Plodding copper’s voice] ‘Now this pair of knickers is – as you can see – torn in two, but there is an identical sperm pattern . . .’ He was very funny, but Epstein was appalled at the rudery and became more and more nervous . . . [until eventually] he said, ‘I’ve just remembered I’ve got an appointment!’ and hurried out to his waiting Rolls.5
To many bright sparks the Crescent seemed like the quintessential des. res., for others it was a competitive, survival-of-the-cleverest environment. Bennett called it a sack of fighting ferrets. Peter Nichols was glad he did not live there and compares Frayn’s aforementioned dinner party, with Miller as guest, to fencing with Errol Flynn: ‘[Jonathan] taking us all on our own ground and sending us each in turn toppling downstairs, careering backwards through a window, disappearing headfirst down a well.’6 Rachel’s visiting sister, Jane, felt that the Crescent residents were constantly on show, with people popping champagne in their gardens, hoping to inspire envy.
It was a fabulous place in which to grow up, according to Sophie Radice (daughter of the MP Giles Radice), but some of the dopier adults dreaded early-morning encounters with Miller’s ever-bounding mind.7 His lack of small talk struck some as almost antisocial. Radice remembers returning, as a youngster, from a trip to the cinema and, agonizingly, being required to analyze the film in depth. Max Stafford-Clark was more appreciatively stunned by chats on the street corner. While he cleaned his car, his fellow director would come up with several brilliant ways of staging King Lear and recommend lists of research books, heading off to fetch them like a fabulous librarian.8
Rachel’s work took her to the rougher side of the tracks in Camden as she was, by this time, working as a GP. During her very first night on call, she had to visit a semi-derelict block of flats, carrying her doctor’s bag of drugs, to attend to a patient who introduced himself as the Birdman of Pentonville. ‘I think Jonathan did worry about me a little bit and, just once, I made him come in the car but only once ever’, she says. ‘I just kind of got on with it and didn’t talk about it very much.’
In a more gently eccentric vein, back in the Crescent, Miss Shepherd (the Lady in the Van) was parked up for so long outside the Millers’ house that Camden Council slapped an obstruction order on her rusting, litter-filled Bedford, labelling it a danger to public health.9 That was the day when she hatched her master plan of camouflaging the vehicle and emerged, artistically swathed in long scarves and a straw hat, armed with a tiny pot of primrose-yellow paint for model cars. She often knocked at the Millers’ door if she wanted a natter or help, usually standing with one leg out at a balletic angle, sometimes complaining about the children being too tall and, on one occasion, initiating the conversation with: ‘Sorry to disturb but I just met a snake coming down Parkway. I wouldn’t have bothered you but I’ve had some very close shaves with snakes.’10 Another time, she wrote to Edward Heath about Britain’s unpardonable entry into the Common Market, then asked Miller to arrange a TV interview, adding warily, ‘I don’t want to attract any publickity [sic] because you know what happened to JFK, so I would give an interview behind a curtain. The programme would be called Lady Behind Curtain.’11
Life in the Crescent was, of course, more run-of-the-mill than the anecdotal highlights suggest. On a weekly basis, the most obvious competition was a race round the corner to Reg’s rag-and-bone stall in Inverness Street. Here Miller and Bennett both bought oddments of antique china and collected vintage group photographs, drawn by the poignancy of sepia perhaps, or by a humorous fascination with institutional formalities, or by the frozen drama of the tableau.
Most of the dinner parties at the Millers’ home were just sociable suppers, with neighbours popping round, virtually like members of the family. One child or more would always be ensconced in the kitchen, declining to go to bed. The theatre critic Susannah Clapp (who lodged with Mary-Kay Wilmers while working at the publishers Jonathan Cape) remembers those meals being ‘proper family gatherings, not at all dressed up. There would be a mix of Rachel’s colleagues and some people from Jonathan’s old life, as it were, like Eric Korn, Nicholas Garland . . . Some people’, she says, ‘get famous and suddenly have a series of new friends but it was never deracinated in that way.’ The Millers also hosted gregarious Sunday breakfasts, and Bennett, Tom’s secular godfather, was like some Chekhovian adopted uncle. Frequently round for two or three meals a day, he had a house key of his own. The family photo albums confirm the casual domesticity, epitomized by a snapshot of the kitchen complete with homely clutter, with Bennett wandering in a blur across the background and with one child grinning in joke-shop Dracula fangs, seated between contented parents. The street was written up by journalists as if it were a celebrity venue. Its inhabitants simply nicknamed it the Fertile Crescent because it was filled with kids running around and skateboarding.12 Socially, the connective tissue centred on picking them up from school, says Miller.
His offspring have all discernibly inherited his irreverent sense of humour and his frankness. Too bright and British to be gushing about what the famed polymath was like as a father, they are wryly satirical in their anecdotes while being palpably fond of him. His son William was not born to be boho and has since gone on to cut multi-million pound deals, as Nigella Lawson’s business partner in the company Pabulum and in other posts. He is particularly entertaining about the school run:
My parents were wonderful and Gloucester Crescent was too in many ways, but, when you look back at the photographs, you think, ‘My God, we were gypsy children!’ . . . And there was this rota. A sort of hippy Dormobile would take half the kids off to one school and a lot of cars would head off to the other. Then, of course, there was a minicab to take a number of the children off to the Tavistock [Clinic] as one or two always needed a bit of counselling to get through this bohemian idyll . . .
I remember when it was my father’s turn in the rota, he always used to swear because he’d forgotten he had to do it. So he’d get into the car, still in his dressing-gown, and drive far too fast. He was a terrible driver! Then someone would cut him up and he would wind down his window, shouting abuse and shaking his fist. His favourite was ‘I’ll rip your fucking thyroid out!’ sometimes followed by ‘And I bet you don’t fucking know where that is!’ It used to amuse my friends, but actually it terrified me because I always thought someone was going to kill him, not understanding that he’s not a violent man at all and the outspoken rage is sort of drama or theatre.13
The motor show aside, this Sixties father was evidently warmer and more physically affectionate than his own parents had been. According to one associate, he never quite knew how to be a standard dad, yet he himself remembers endless playfulness, hugging and tumbling. He enjoys the fact that his children (and now his grandchildren) say what they please, free of dutiful respect. By all accounts, he was non-authoritarian and spoke merrily of being twisted round his daughter’s little finger. William could be manipulative, sending his father to Coventry if they had a disagreement. ‘It was an awful thing to do,’ he confesses, ‘because my father is a terribly loving, kind person and he would always break first.’ Miller’s old friend Nicholas Garland recalls him being protectively tender with Tom as well, when the toddler’s kite blew away in the park on Primrose Hill:
I have this tiny memory [of how] Jonathan began running after it, then Tom suddenly burst into tears because his father – his one life-support system – was disappearing. I picked Tom up and called, ‘You get the kite,’ but he simply couldn’t do it and I remember thinking how touching that he came back to comfort the child and the kite was lost for ever.
Over the years, he has weathered some surly and tempestuous days with his family. One episode was a notable variation on the incident from his own boyhood when Emanuel frostily locked him out of Queen’s Grove. As a friend recollects, Tom had been banished to the garden by his father, after throwing a tantrum, and was screaming through the glass. However, rather than coolly continue the adult conversation inside, Miller became distraught about the child’s grief and was unsure what to do, eventually letting him in again. Again, when one of his youngsters hit a rough patch in adolescence, he evidently wanted to help. He took part in family therapy sessions (the very practice his father pioneered at the Tavistock Clinic), setting aside his own doubts and his earlier resistance to Rachel’s phase of professional interest in psychiatry.14
In no uncertain terms, Tom, William and Kate declined to follow in his academic footsteps. The children of this immensely clever man all failed to excel at school, in spite of being manifestly bright. William describes them as the stubborn illiterati, a small resistance movement:
My father used to read to us, Emil and the Detectives with all the accents, which was a kind of transcendental experience, but he was sometimes a bully about reading. When we were small and bored, his favourite expression was ‘Have you tried prising open the covers of a book?’ and, because we endlessly had these books thrust in front of us, of course we never read . . . We had a very strange relationship with television too. My first memory of my father and television was staying up very late, on the sofa with a duvet, just to see his name on the credits . . . However, coming home and finding us watching the television – sitting round like zombies – used to deeply depress him. I mean, I don’t blame him . . . In the end he just lost it and said, ‘That’s it!’ He picked it up and took it to the junk store. So we had no television for a couple of years.
Undefeated, the two boys used to clamber over the garden wall to watch Grandstand with the soccer-loving philosopher Freddie Ayer and his son Nicholas (Nigella Lawson’s half-brother).
Tom says that neither he nor his siblings are bothered about their lack of A-levels though, at one point, their father was envious about others’ kids going to Cambridge and wished, unwittingly within his eldest’s hearing, that he had children he could converse with properly.15 As an undergraduate, Miller had pictured himself working at the university for ever and having descendants who married into dynasties of the intellectual aristocracy.16 If he remains at all disappointed, he now chastises himself for not doing better in the paternal league tables. He recognizes that his growing children were what he lived for, but he was nervously fraught in some respects and culpably careless in others. He had educational goals similar to his own parents’, yet he relied on comprehensive schools which he condemns, retrospectively, as multi-storey child parks. Both he and his wife were committed to that egalitarian system. However, this ideology, he now says, justified his parsimony.
Neither he nor Rachel even realized that Kate was playing truant. His daughter was the most obvious rebel of the three in her adolescence, sporting rockabilly hairstyles and not seeing eye to eye with her father. An amused admiration now infuses his account of how she managed to live a secret double life, working as a café manageress in nearby Kentish Town when she was meant to be at school. She was to meet her future husband, a managing director of a chain store, in her late teens, and she worked her way up from television company receptionist to production manager. In that capacity, she was to organize the TV film of her father’s staging of Bach’s St Matthew Passion before she took some years off to be a full-time mother.17
Her brothers both suffered from bullying at school and Miller felt that he let them down when a belated transfer to private education neither suited Tom nor saved William’s grades. Although the family stammer was not passed down, Tom struggled with dyslexia which went undiagnosed until he was seventeen. Being Jonathan Miller’s son made matters worse. ‘I was ridiculed by my teachers,’ he exclaims, ‘mostly because of Dad! . . . You know, “I’m surprised you’re so bad at maths, considering who your father is”.’ Still, he discovered his talent for photography at thirteen, thanks to the school darkroom, and his parents installed one at home, encouraging his interest.
The public school Bedales was William’s idea of bliss.18 It seemed to him like a confidence-reviving convalescent home after the comprehensive which he had attended, and his growing independence took a startling form. He is not sure whether his father was more appalled by Kate becoming a rockabilly or by him turning into a roaring Sloane. The divergence between his and the other Millers’ lifestyle choices started with his covert house-tidying, after everyone was in bed. They were to climax some years later when Tom turned up to his brother’s wedding in motorbike gear, leading to a petulant tiff over proper dress codes.19 ‘Dad laughed,’ William remarks, ‘but then he came in dirty old corduroys and a tweed jacket!’ In a mocking vein, Tom declares that his younger brother practically skipped childhood, seeming thirty at the age of ten. ‘I was in my teens getting rat-arsed smoking dope. The parents were the original Stringalong Sixties liberals [as in the caricatured couple of that name in Life and Times in NW1] so they didn’t object’, he says. ‘Meanwhile William was [next door] having tea and muffins with A. J. Ayer’s wife . . . and Shirley Conran.’ The latter was the ex-wife of Habitat-founder Terence Conran and the mother of Sebastian Conran, another future business partner in Pabulum, though at that point roving around the Crescent as a teenage punk.
Even as an infant, Miller’s middle child had a kind of alternative, out-of-town family because he adored his father’s researcher and secretary, Sue Rogers (now Sue Bond as she married the creator of Paddington Bear). She became part of the family, typing in the living-room, sometimes alongside Bennett. The little boy took a shine to her and she took him to stay at Stanage, her parents’ Victorian castle in Wales. Her mother, the ex-West End actress Stella Moore, became William’s unofficial godparent and, for him, spending holidays there was like escaping to a completely different, enchanted life.20
On the religious front, Miller ignored Emanuel’s continued digs about ‘striking Anglo-Saxon attitudes’ and actively countered his own Santa-free childhood with stacks of Christmas glitter. The doctrine which he disseminated at home was atheism, as he makes clear, though William went through an adolescent phase of churchgoing at Stanage, which shocked both parents. Similarly, Rachel bought the Bible just as a cultural keystone and was horrified by its violent tales, only to find this was the one book that Tom would read avidly.
Shedding additional light on his own and Miller’s ethics, William points out that he is not just some inexplicably conservative changeling:
My father is actually a very moral man, with views based on religious morals . . . For someone who’s always so critical of formal society, he is a real old English gentleman with traditional beliefs about courtesy and common decencies. I used to get the most appalling ticking-off for not having said ‘Thank you’ and he taught me, ‘If you’re arrogant or rude, you’ll never be forgiven for it. People remember you for that for ever.’
This is followed by a stupendous story, from some years on, of his father hotly pursuing criminals:
We’d just come out of some unbelievably turgid French film at the Renoir Cinema, and this woman along the street screamed ‘I’ve been mugged’ . . . By the time I’d turned back round there was no sign of my father. Then I saw him, in the distance, down that concrete precinct, chasing these two really violent-looking kids. I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to get murdered’ . . . Then the rest of this Bloomsbury cinema-going set decided, ‘Oh right, we ought to have a go too!’ So there was this posse of tweed jackets and corduroys running down this concourse . . .
We eventually caught up with my father who was, by now, waving a bread palette over his head and shouting, ‘I’ll fucking kill you! Stop, you little shits!’ And as we’re running along with my father absolutely leader of the pack, screaming abuse, I overhear this man huffing and puffing and saying to my father, ‘We once met at Susan Sontag’s,’ and my father having to break his anger to say, ‘Oh really, how fascinating . . . You fucking cunts, stop!’
Eventually, they actually did stop. These boys turned round and took out a baseball bat. Suddenly, there was this look of complete fear on everybody’s face, apart from my father who started doing all this ‘Come on, then!’ I had to grab him by the collar and drag him back, and he didn’t forgive me for a week. He accused me of being a coward. I said, ‘I’m not. They would have killed you!’ and he said, ‘No, that’s not the way to behave.’ I was quite shocked.
As a young father, Miller had worried that he would pass on physical cowardice to his children.21
As for his progeny being little philistines, that was not really the case. Tom was a gifted youth-orchestra cellist and his brother won a school scholarship as a singer and oboist. William wanted to become a medic as well, having already declared as a toddler that he was going to pursue his father’s other professions, namely ‘readin’, writin’, smokin’ and the postin’ of letters’.22
Miller bought a holiday home, an old manse in the Scottish Highlands, with the proceeds of an advert-cum-documentary about whisky-making, which he directed for Johnnie Walker, arthouse-style.23 When staying there with his children, he would take them on wonderful forays into the hills, giving them biology field kits, helping them to collect samples of bog water, then revealing its thriving life forms under the microscope. He once screeched to a halt in the car, leaped out and slung a dead hare in the back, promptly pinning it to the breadboard at home and giving a master class in dissection. It was, William acknowledges, hugely inspiring and, when he duly went on to do biology ‘A’ level, he could at least dissect the hind legs off a rabbit with panache.
He believes his father perceived that he was more ambitious than his siblings and, sensing this could be harnessed, hoped he would become a doctor. ‘I was definitely influenced by my father and very keen to do the things that he wanted me to do, for him to be impressed. Even as a child, one was competing with him,’ he states. ‘But I realized eventually that it was absolutely pointless trying to compete.’ In short, Miller was a pushover emotionally but was intellectually dominant, even unintentionally domineering. The praise he bestowed did not always seem lavish enough either. While thrilled to be shown a school project, he would urge further reading or launch into an expert lecture. This took the fun out of the parent–child relationship and made the work achieved seem woefully insufficient. In a later incident, as a young adult, William gained a pilot’s licence and, as he recounts, took his father flying:
Though [the episode] was amusing, more than anything else . . . I so wanted him to say, ‘This is just extraordinary. I never thought I’d have a son who could do this!’ . . . We got airborne and he did not say a word . . . and then over Canary Wharf, there was this incredible hazy sunset and the Thames like this sort of silver snake. I tilted the wings so he could look straight down at it and I said, ‘That’s Canary Wharf. Isn’t it beautiful?’ And he just went: ‘That’s where the cunts from the Telegraph are.’
Both of them share a desperate craving for approval, William suggests, even as he laughs about their divergent characteristics:
From when I was very small, I’ve always wanted to run things and been frightfully organized . . . That’s the complete opposite to my father who’s like W. C. Fields. He’s got all these bank accounts and doesn’t know where they are or what’s in them, or how to use a credit card! He has taken massive creative risks in his career but never dreamed of taking financial ones. He has a complete panic attack when I say I’m borrowing a million pounds from the bank. And the funny thing is that Nigella [Lawson], who has absolutely no understanding of business, is the daughter of a Chancellor of the Exchequer. I think, actually, we both wanted to do something totally different from our fathers.
Maybe William’s marketing nous was inherited from his shopkeeping ancestors.
Opinions differ on whether the youngsters had to compete with their father for the domestic limelight or whether they felt that he was a busy absentee, as Miller had regarding Emanuel. Maybe the more obvious rivalry was just between Tom and William who admit that they ‘wind each other up spectacularly’.24 However, Miller is like an eternal little boy as well, always demanding attention, according to one frequenter of the Crescent. Regarding his absenteeism, his children recall that he would vanish from their Scottish holiday home because of supposed work crises. They suspect he was plain bored. He insists that he was there much of the time in Scotland. He has photographs of days at the seaside to prove it.
More shamefacedly, he admits that they once left the infant Kate at the beach, assuming she was in their companions’ car. He also confesses that he scared her stiff by – of all things, given his infantine fears – pretending to be dead. He was not always up for larking around either. The flip-side of this celebrated entertainer is that, though not suffering from severe manic depression, he is prone to what he describes as waves of overriding despondency and acute self-doubt. At odds with his CV, which gives the impression of endless energy, he states that active stints, inducing euphoria, are interspersed with long stretches of lassitude and hopeless indecisiveness. Maybe this is why melancholic figures have featured so often in his productions, adopting the stance of the downcast angel in Dürer’s allegorical picture Melencolia (aka Melencolia I) – seated with head leaning on hand.25
His depressive tendency might be traced back to the previous generation. Genetically, he could have inherited it from Emanuel. Psychoanalysts additionally link some adult depression to an early deficit of parental love. According to Freud, melancholia is a ‘disorder of self-esteem’. When a love-object is denied or lost, the love is redirected in a complex way, turning inwards, like narcissism but mixed with feelings of reproach which, consequently, can emerge as intense self-condemnation (as well as condemnation of the other).26 Perhaps Miller’s pronounced confidence is, in fact, defensive, creating a sense of elation that drowns out his inner critic most of the time, but not always.
Depressions have stopped him working. They have slowed the hand in writing, like a kind of psychological arthritis, and made him dread the possibility of complete paralysis – a vivacious personality reduced to the living dead. He likens the mood-swing to a bright, expanding star suddenly shrinking to a high-density white dwarf with no source of energy.27 He prefers to sit out the bad days than to seek any medicated fix.
One friend, keen enough on his Tiggerish aspects but with no time for his Eeyorish alter ego, suggests the man’s bouts of protracted dejection would make even his nearest and dearest think of nudging him under a bus. Miller states that he has never been truly suicidal or deeply destructive. From his family’s point of view, one of Tom’s youthful attempts to please him – returning from a paper round and piling the reviews of his latest production on the bed – provoked a day of frightful moroseness. Emanuel’s ‘great pall of gloom’ comes to mind when William remarks:
If you were to talk about the downside, the hardest thing of my childhood was that I found his depressions worrying, not because they were going to come in white coats and take him away, but because I felt I couldn’t do anything . . . I’d try and amuse him but it wouldn’t work. It was so irrational. I was confused and upset by it. When he’d say ‘Life’s not worth living’, I just remember being terrified and taking it seriously . . .
But, though my mother says her biggest regret was she went straight back to work after having us, I don’t remember feeling neglected or that my parents were absent . . . I hated my father going away for long periods of time when I was young but I only recall a couple of occasions when that happened. Actually, we were surrounded by people.
That statement qualifies another simplistic view of the informally extended family, viz. that the avuncular Bennett assumed some kind of gap-filling, substitute-father role. Miller did return from some out-of-town projects to find his brood chattering about doing this and that with Alan. Often, though, his directing work and home life overlapped because he invited his casts round to rehearse at his house.
The Millers, furthermore, became an extended family with extra children. Besides the secretarial Sue Rogers, they had a home-help called Beatrice Thomas, a Jamaican émigré whom Rachel knew from her days at the Royal Free Hospital. Beatrice had been a successful shop owner in the West Indies, yet found herself working as an ill-paid NHS cleaner in the so-called mother country. She was facing eviction in the mid-1960s when the Millers suggested that she could help look after their toddlers. She moved in to live on their top floor with her two daughters, Esther and Haleem, who was known as Jeannie.
When Beatrice and Esther moved on again some years later, the adolescent Jeannie said she wanted to stay and she became – like Rachel with Great-Aunt Brenda – an unofficial ward. According to Jeannie’s own account, reminiscing three decades on:
My mother was happy with Jonathan and Rachel because they were very respectful to her, but my relationship with her was fraught . . . [Coming to England] I was in a daze and couldn’t understand things, and my mother was very impatient so I got more and more traumatized . . . The first moving thing she ever said to me – which made me weep later – was when she consented and said, ‘Go to them, because they’ll probably give you what I can’t’ . . .
I am known as their daughter, and I called them ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ so much in the first few weeks that I must have driven them up the wall. But it was so nice. I’d never had a daddy before and it was like saying ‘Father Christmas’, and I didn’t get shouted at! As a mum and dad, they were extremely patient with me and the nurturing was emotionally and intellectually very stimulating . . . The house was always buzzing [with visitors]. Lots of books and plays and journalistic articles have started as ideas discussed at Jonathan’s kitchen table and I was there! The house was like a museum too, with a skeleton in the attic, old Victorian stuff, costumes and stereoscopes, and Jonathan just bubbled 24/7 . . . so I was flying and bubbling too.
He always bought me books whenever he went abroad, the most incredible rare books on black people. He got me interested in black history, so I never had a loss of identity with him . . . George Melly took me over to his house and put on Bessie Smith, jazz and blues . . . [while] Jonathan played lots of classical music and bought me my first records, starting with Vaughan Williams. He was a very good father . . . His kids, who are extremely clever, probably did resist it, but he made me love learning and I was in heaven.
There was only one piece of paternal advice which she found bemusingly metaphorical, when Miller told her that, with boys, she just had to make sure she didn’t get a bun in the oven. ‘I spent weeks wondering what would happen to the bun,’ she says, ‘and that was my dad’s sex education lesson!’28 She went on to work with children in care and then in alternative healing.
Keith McNally, the son of an East End cabbie and now one of Manhattan’s best-known restaurateurs, also became a kind of family friend/surrogate son. This was after he left school to act, at sixteen, and quickly landed a part in Bennett’s first West End hit, Forty Years On (1968). After that he lodged for a while at the playwright’s house and would be round at the Millers’ home three or four times a week, sometimes staying over and looking after the children, but mostly being inspired by their father’s conversation. He spent time at the holiday home in Scotland as well.
Miller was, he notes, a great teacher, never condescending but eager to engage, enthusing him about films, art, Dickens. Indeed, the man’s powers of description invited comparison with that supremely eloquent author, suggests McNally, who goes on to underline how generous Miller was with his time and money – always paying for everything and even offering to fund him through college.
Watching Miller’s productions, McNally likewise absorbed his taste for beautifully worn decor and for understated performances. After he quit acting, he went on to make two feature films himself, End of the Night and Far from Berlin, besides establishing New York’s Odeon, Balthazar and other acclaimed bistros.29 When he is building a new restaurant, he always thinks about how Miller (though clueless about cooking) would see it, design-wise. Seeking to imitate his relaxed egalitarianism, McNally says he has no truck with prejudice, snobbery or pretension when managing his employees. The two of them still chat, too, about art exhibitions and films.
To return to Miller’s stage directing, in the late 1960s he made swift progress – via London’s Mermaid Theatre and Nottingham Playhouse – to become one of Laurence Olivier’s hottest protégés in the National Theatre company. This raft of work drew him away, on a rip current, from television dramas.30
The British theatre was undergoing remarkable developments, encouraged by more funding from Harold Wilson’s government. The decade has indeed been described as the most amazing in this art form since Shakespeare’s 1590s.31 Peter Hall had not only established the RSC in 1960, he had further secured a West End base for the company at the Aldwych. Along with Peter Brook’s aforementioned Theatre of Cruelty productions for the RSC (influenced by France’s radical Antonin Artaud), the Aldwych hosted seasons that showcased top international troupes from 1964 onwards. Word of Jacques Lecoq’s brilliant mime and physical theatre school, in Paris, had also reached Britain.
Under Olivier, meanwhile, the NT corps had been founded at Chichester’s brand new Festival Theatre in 1962, with the Old Vic in Waterloo becoming its London residence (until its permanent home was built on the South Bank). Other vibrant regional theatres sprang up in Liverpool, Bolton and Stoke-on-Trent, as well as in Nottingham. Edinburgh’s Traverse, a pioneering studio space in a former doss house, opened in 1963 to perpetuate the spirit of the fringe all year round, and the Edinburgh Festival influentially brought Grotowski’s raw, intense company from Poland to the West in 1968. Experimental approaches were, thus, gaining ground, and the Open Space Theatre, set up by Charles Marowitz and Thelma Holt on Tottenham Court Road, served as a forerunner of the London fringe.
As for the Mermaid, that was a thriving Thames-side venue, in situ since 1959 among the wharfs and warehouses of Puddle Dock, Blackfriars (just across the river from where Shakespeare’s reconstructed Globe now stands). The theatre was run by Bernard Miles who launched his seasons, like a salty sea captain, with the clanging of a ship’s bell. Miller’s first production here was Benito Cereno, a sinister drama that unfolds on a dilapidated slave-trading vessel. It is boarded by a Yankee captain who fails to discern that the underdogs have mutinied.
Adapted from Herman Melville’s novella, this was the strongest play from Robert Lowell’s highly poetic trilogy The Old Glory, which Miller had premiered in Manhattan in 1964 – impressively managing a 40-strong cast and generating menace with a languorous, hypnotic pace.32 The New York Times’ reviewer, Walter Kerr, had been dismissive about this production, which inaugurated the American Place Theater (a newly converted, off-Broadway church). A critical battle began when the poet Randall Jarrell wrote a letter to the NYT’s editor, declaring it be the best American drama he had ever seen and superbly directed.33 Robert Brustein of the New Republic magazine backed Jarrell up, greeting The Old Glory as not only an allegory about the States’ foreign policies and race relations but also a theatrical renaissance, far superior to Broadway’s pulp.34 Miller once dryly remarked that his productions always split critical opinion and something would be wrong if they didn’t.35
Starring Roscoe Lee Browne and Frank Langella (aged just 24), The Old Glory went on to become a long-running hit for the burgeoning fringe. It transferred to the Theater de Lys, won five Obies and was recorded for television.36 In terms of Miller’s artistic development, it was part of an extended phase of dreamlike, highly stylized productions. Even if he now sees tiny naturalistic gestures as his trademark, he is no simple realist and his declared aim, in this piece, was to escape the ‘dead hand’ of naturalism.37 His use of long silences, almost ritualistic slow movements and puppet-like gestures is seen, today, as having influenced the top American experimentalists Robert Wilson and Andrei Serban.38
Arguments had arisen in rehearsals. Playing the leading slave-mutineer, Browne was allegedly infuriated by what he saw as ‘typical white directing’. He and Miller talked it through in the end. For Langella, the production exerted such a grip that, after the run, he slept for three whole days. He was, at the same time, impressed by the director’s light touch and divergence from Lee Strasberg’s Method.39 Miller scorns that revered school’s practice of discussing characters’ inner lives at length, slating it as ‘sentimental balderdash infected with American psychoanalytical bullshit’.40
He was far more sympathetic about Lowell really needing psychiatric care. The writer suffered from manic depression or bipolar disorder, veering between extreme lows and hyperactive mania. Staying in the studio flat above the Lowells’ apartment, Miller handled those psychotic phases with medical understanding, affection and humour. Nonetheless, his host did become alarmingly cranky, dressing in peculiar clothes and insistently staying up all night.41 On one occasion, the director found himself at 4 a.m. in a downtown laundromat, trying to talk his febrile, sweating dramatist out of wildly extravagant schemes.
The Old Glory’s cast doubtless realized something was awry when Lowell dashed in, two days before opening night, announcing he had penned a whole extra play, featuring Walter Raleigh’s decapitated head. The streaming blood, he assured them, could be done very nicely with ribbons. The poet’s wife and Miller managed to get him into a quiet unit in the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, though the patient was on the phone within half an hour, eagerly continuing the conversation with, ‘Oh Jonathan, you must come and see me . . . No, no, I’m allowed any visitors I like. Use the service elevator and say you’re Stanley Kunitz.’ Recovering from the Raleigh episode, he was manifestly grateful, describing the staging of The Old Glory as little short of miraculous.42
Miller directed Benito Cereno again at the Mermaid in 1967, with Peter Eyre as the beleaguered slave-ship’s captain, with Rudolph Walker (today of EastEnders fame) in Browne’s role, and with Alan Dobie as the Yankee. Punch magazine championed the production as a near-masterpiece, with the disquieting clarity of a nightmare. By contrast, it bombed with the Sunday papers’ critics who condemned it for soporific mumblings and scant dramatic action.43 That did not stop Miller heading straight back to the USA to premiere Lowell’s very free adaptation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, with Kenneth Haigh in the title role and Irene Worth playing Io (who passes by, gadfly-plagued, having been seduced by Zeus). Prometheus Bound was the climax of the first season at Yale Repertory Theatre, which had just been established by Robert Brustein (the New Republic critic-turned-dean of Yale Drama School, programming professional productions).
Back once more in a university community, Miller gave lectures when he wasn’t rehearsing and had a splendidly sociable time. He dined with the students regularly and became good friends with Ronald Dworkin, the professor of law and philosophy.44 Dworkin affirms that this visitor was a joy to have around and says that, with such imagination, erudition and uniquely connective thinking, ‘Jonathan is so good a philosopher that it’s easy for me to forget that that’s just one of the amazingly diverse worlds in which he’s a star.’ On the same campus, a small but farcical misunderstanding arose when Miller was introduced to the Polish-born literary critic Jan Kott (of Shakespeare Our Contemporary fame). Startled by Kott’s inquiry, ‘’Ave you zeen ze erse of Peter Brook?’, the Englishman replied with abstemious politeness that he admired the man and his work but, no, he had not seen his arse. Only then did he realize the point of reference was Brook’s latest production, US.45
Miller was the darling of Yale, Brustein confirms, and dozens of American universities were to follow suit over the years, inviting him in to serve as an inspiring live-wire. Giving lectures satisfies his lingering urge to perform. He has befriended many fine minds by enthusiastically knocking on campus doors, and he has felt useful as an informative ‘welcome gadfly’, darting between the humanities and science departments. These residencies have been a cherished part of his career, outside the limelight.46
Prometheus Bound was, admittedly, hard to bring to dramatic life with its mythological protagonist, chained to a rock, orating at personifications of Force and Power. This was another case of Haigh having to tackle long monologues. Still, this rebel Titan with a cause, shackled for enlightening mankind with fire and knowledge, was clearly an Angry Young God.47 Lowell pointedly departed from Aeschylus’ original to weave in his own concerns about contemporary dictators and repressed progressive thinkers. This attracted the ire of President Johnson, no less. Brustein has since learned that LBJ covertly demanded that the production’s grant be axed when he heard that Lowell was making Zeus’ aggressive policies sound like his own. With Promethean valour, the National Endowment for the Arts ignored the order.48
For his staging, Miller spurned the ‘aspic of classical decor’, plumping instead for a seventeenth-century prison setting.49 That, he argued, brought out extra historical correlatives (such as Cromwell’s regime) and helped the message come through to a modern audience – working like a hilltop transmitter, part-way between ancient times and the present.50 Not all the critics were won over by this idea, or by the cast’s conversational style. Several objected that Miller, the satirist and scientist, had erased the work’s grand poetic dimensions.51
Similar complaints were to recur down the years. In other words, this director – who, as a child, had wanted more emotionally demonstrative parents – was chided as an adult for damping down dramatic interactions. Still, Prometheus Bound’s dreamlike episodes and mordant wit were appreciated, and Walter Kerr amazed everyone by writing a largely glowing New York Times notice.52 As a consequence, it was officially a big hit. Writing to Sacks, Miller was on a high after this ‘smash success . . . one of the best things I have ever done’.53
Moreover, his notion of creating that hilltop transmitter by translating the action to another century was the germ of his whole theory about historical transpositions, about plays having ‘afterlives’ thanks to what he terms ‘renovatio’. At its most straightforward, the renovatio thesis is that vintage dramas, instead of dying, can be refreshed via a change of setting. By being played out in a different time or place – artistically emigrating – a work enjoys its own kind of renaissance or rebirth.
Those key ideas would grow more subtle and form a central tenet of Miller’s book Subsequent Performances two decades later. The concepts of renewal and inventive translation actually extend right back as well, into his memories of childhood. Take, for instance, the way he recalls his parents being ‘mysteriously renovated’ by their World War 2 outfits. Or, in terms of linguistic translations, there were all those alternative paraphrases needed to circumvent his stammer. However, Prometheus Bound was the first significant instance of him practising renovatio theatrically.
He linked up again with Haigh and Worth in the UK, making a BBC Radio recording of Prometheus Bound, then he moved on to the play’s British stage premiere at the Mermaid, this time with Haigh and Angela Thorne.54 Amidst divergent opinions, the London Evening News sang the praises of that ‘austere and superb production . . . the epitome of theatrical discipline’.55
By this point, he was officially one of Bernard Miles’ jovial crew, joining the governors’ board and directing The Tempest at the same address in 1970.56 That staging was a prime example of his enriching, widely informed outlook, for he drew on an anthropological and psychoanalytical analysis (by Dr Octave Mannoni). This discerned colonial relationships in Shakespeare’s late romance.57 So, Renaissance costumes were retained but the long-established depictions of Caliban and Ariel, as base monster and ethereal sprite, were jettisoned. Instead. Rudolph Walker and Norman Beaton (who would later star in Desmond’s) played them as indigenous black islanders from two tribes, responding differently to the white paternalism of Prospero. Walker’s more naive, sometimes chortling Caliban contrasted with Beaton’s smart Ariel, who was more like a sophisticated butler-going-on-civil servant. In turn, Graham Crowden’s Prospero had gone semi-native, wearing a witch doctor’s robe over his Puritan garb. Inviting comparisons with twentieth-century conflicts in Nigeria and the Madagascar Revolt, Ariel ultimately picked up Prospero’s discarded staff as if to keep Caliban in the post-colonial underclass.
The duo also behaved like rebellious, stroppy little boys, growing up as time passed, and Miller highlighted how Prospero behaved curiously like an analyst in his first scene with Miranda, encouraging his daughter to become a liberated adult via an act of creative reminiscence. (‘What seest thou else/In the dark backward and abysm of time? If thou remember’st aught ere thou camest here . . .’)58
Even if this staging implied all the magic was in the characters’ minds, it entranced most reviewers. The Times described the production as in a class by itself, even by Miller’s standards, and it was to prove seminal.59 His anthropological interpretation was, for instance, essentially being replayed by the RSC director Michael Boyd in 2002, and it was taken as read by the company Tara Arts in their colonial West End production of 2007.60
Beaton retrospectively described Miller’s Tempest as one of the most pleasurable projects in his career, and the single most important one. Parts for black actors were thin on the ground then, and it was his first major classical role. Somewhat ironically perhaps, given the colonial relations issue, he described the audition as ‘virtually like going to meet God’. As an inexperienced young actor, Walker had initially been nervous as well, due to the reputational clouds of glory surrounding Miller. To their relief, he proved charmingly genial. ‘Jonathan soon put me at ease,’ Walker says. ‘We had a very good relationship, working together more than once. He made The Tempest very real, Caliban very human. I liked that he gave you several options, three ways you could do [a scene], allowing the actor to choose.’ In rehearsals, Beaton recalled, each speech was closely examined like the entrails of a fascinating new specimen, and Miller’s textual explanations were like dazzlingly witty dissertations, similes pouring from his lips ‘like pearls’.61
The Tempest was not, in fact, Miller’s first Shakespeare production. Shortly before that, he had looped back to Cambridge University, responding to an invitation from a new troupe of students called the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company. They could not believe their luck when he agreed to direct their US-touring production of Twelfth Night. The next year, he asked if he could come back and stage Hamlet, making it a hat-trick with Julius Caesar in 1971. Regardless of being a big name, he loves a small-scale enterprise and the OCSC were an outstanding bunch. Even those playing bit parts were to become famous.
His Rozencrantz was Charles Sturridge (subsequently the director of Brideshead Revisited), Guildernstern was Nicholas Evans (author of The Horse Whisperer), and John Madden (director of Shakespeare in Love) portrayed Osric as a sinister henchman, with Sarah Dunant (the novelist) as a lady-in-waiting. The young Michael Wood (presenter of the BBC’s In Search of Shakespeare and other series) was Orsino, writhing on his daybed in a leather codpiece. Donald Macintyre (now a top political correspondent for the Independent) played the fool, Feste, while Sir Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek were Jonathan James-Moore (later head of BBC Radio’s light entertainment) and Mark Wing-Davey (the actor-director best known as Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Miller’s assistant was Michael Coveney (future theatre critic), and Oxford postgraduate Elijah Moshinsky (another top director in the making) watched these OCSC productions avidly, taking the helm thereafter.
Virtually everyone remembers Miller’s rehearsals as a golden time. Sturridge comments:
It was enormously enjoyable. Jonathan creates a gang that you are in twenty-four hours a day, having long arguments into the night . . . He perhaps preaches in a way, but it’s with a fervour that is very exciting. You can definitely trace, in our group, this habit which people caught from him of Milleresque [persuasively accelerating] rapid speech . . . If Jonathan influenced me as a director, it is in his very characteristic accumulation of disparate sources.
Coveney agrees:
It was like the most stimulating tutorial company you’d ever had . . . and he was superb at finding things these young students could relate to in their roles. Then he went round [touring America] with us on a Greyhound bus for about five weeks and became our sort of elder brother or uncle. He entertained everyone, just sort of chatting up the girls and pulling funny faces – those beaky things he used to do in Beyond the Fringe. He was just this brilliant figure in our lives . . . I still think he is the most brilliant person I’ve ever met.
Wood adds:
I remember I was reading a new book on the philosopher Plotinus on the bus, and he immediately borrowed it . . . He had a wonderful, wonderful enquiring mind and was always reading fifteen things at the same time . . . He was just fantastically inspiring, and he had made it in the media which, at that time, was an incredibly exciting world – before television had gone up its own arse . . . [As a director], he had a very exciting and different way of looking. He was trying to disrupt clichéd ways of playing Shakespeare. I mean he chose Don Macintyre to be this snarling Feste who couldn’t sing.
In terms of his directorial theory of renovatio, Twelfth Night saw Miller increasingly looking two ways, both ahead and backwards in time. If he was forward-looking in disrupting theatrical clichés, he was equally reinstating more authentic details from past times.62 He was still learning, at this stage, how to use the history of ideas and the art history, which he had been absorbing since his own undergraduate days at Cambridge. Not all the Renaissance iconography that he brought in worked smoothly. He envisaged Shakespeare’s Illyria, where the shipwrecked Viola comes ashore, strewn with symbolic Platonic forms (dodecahedrons, cones and cubes) as seen in Dürer’s Melencolia.63 The snag was his young cast kept tripping over the esoteric furniture.64 In the end he simply jettisoned it, displaying more pragmatism than intellectual pedantry. What remained were visually breathtaking allusions to Botticelli. Viola emerged from the waves like Venus, seemingly naked, and the closing union of the lovers echoed, most beautifully, the dancing Graces in Primavera.
Once again, discordant reactions erupted in the press. On the initial British leg of the tour, the Listener’s critic D. A. N. Jones wrote off the production as dismally gloomy, having recklessly left before the end of the performance. This led to a barrage of irate readers’ letters, including a cutting missive from the playwright Simon Gray who likened Jones to a colour-blind man in an art gallery. In his own review in the New Statesman, Gray said this Twelfth Night outshone even the RSC’s excellent staging (by Miller’s old university director, John Barton). It was the most subtly funny, forlorn and penetrating rendition he had ever seen.65 After trekking around America and featuring on James Mossman’s BBC TV arts programme Review, the OCSC went on to perform at the play’s original Elizabethan venue, London’s Middle Temple Hall.66 That idea was picked up in 2002, when Mark Rylance took his Globe Theatre production of Twelfth Night there. ‘Jonathan brings all the ideas to the table,’ Elijah Moshinsky observes. ‘He has done a lot of thinking for other directors . . . and certainly no-one, at that time, was using analysis and literary criticism imaginatively as he was.’
Miller’s first Hamlet, a play he has staged four times in all, was strikingly full of personal reverberations. That is to say the reviewers saw his highly intelligent Prince of Denmark (played by the OCSC’s Hugh Thomas) as a love-deprived child.67 His own programme notes quoted from a biography of Proust, focusing on the abiding hunger for unconditional affection caused by maternal embraces being denied during childhood. Those who think this director has tricky relationships with father figures might point to his other programme note, on Freud’s theories about patricidal urges. This discussed how a son’s mixed feelings – competitive animosity plus suppressed sympathy – can lead to a search for ‘convenient surrogates’ to hate (such as Hamlet’s step-father Claudius).68 Moshinsky believes Old Hamlet’s ghost related to Miller’s own father. ‘He really had a thing about the ghost. It was terribly important he should talk to Hamlet as a father to a son and, by talking to him, drive him mad,’ he recollects. ‘Jonathan may say he doesn’t use his own experience but he does, all the time.69 I think he doesn’t know himself. He is a personal director but rationalizes it, lets his emotion into productions via scientific facts.’
Still, Freud was talking about primal father–son relationships and Miller says that he merely wanted an anti-melodramatic spectre, very commonplace, no special effects. ‘People seem to think ghosts should be wreathed in smoke and ten feet tall, with incurable hoarse bronchitis, but’, he explains humorously, ‘I’ve never understood why death should bring about those changes.’70 Again, it should be underlined that creative output cannot always be mapped closely onto the life of the individual producing it. To claim that Miller uses directing as a substitute for psychotherapy – expressing his emotions through others’ plays and playacting – would be crazily reductive. Actors who have worked with him confirm that he rarely refers to his own emotional experiences, being more likely to correlate characters with people at one remove from himself, with medical cases, with someone he has just seen on the bus. As a doctor and director, he has mainly attended to others, not introspectively to himself.
Whatever inspired his staging, Hamlet transferred to the Fortune Theatre, Beyond the Fringe’s former West End haunt. Then he became challengingly avant-garde with Julius Caesar. Spurred on by the stunning boldness of Peter Brook’s white-box-and-trapezes Midsummer Night’s Dream, Miller presented Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy like a phantasmagoric nightmare, in a setting akin to Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings.71 This was a long way from the toga-wearing St Paul’s production of his adolescence. On an orange ramp against a stark sky, his crowd choreography – with a masked mob in body stockings moving in the style of zombie-mannequins – came close to mime or modern dance. Jonathan James-Moore’s Caesar was a white-suited, arrogant, Edwardian patriarch, strung upside down like the murdered Mussolini or a toppled statue.
Miller’s affiliation with theatrical iconoclasts was, seemingly, confirmed here (albeit the Mussolini allusion was not groundbreaking, having been used in Olivier’s Coriolanus in 1959). A disapproving John Mortimer (he who created Rumpole) accused him, in the Observer, of vandalizing a lofty classic because he had, for starters, lopped off the opening scene.72 Even the Marlowe Society veteran Dadie Rylands sighed, ‘Oh dear, what have you done with Mr Shakespeare this time?’ when he met the director in Cambridge. Those claiming that Miller imposed outlandish conceits were countered by Michael Billington who described him as a careful paleontologist or ‘one-man X-ray unit exposing the structure and sinew [of a play]’.73
Such divergent portrayals of Miller can themselves create an impression similar to an X-rayed painting, the different views of him generating a multi-layered, ghosting effect. He has contributed to that himself. On the one hand, he has forcefully stated that a director has no obligations whatsoever to the playwright.74 The absent progenitor has inevitably surrendered control. On the other hand, he has tersely distinguished himself from directors who brashly modernize vintage dramas with no sensitivity to the past’s cultural differences.75 Somewhere in the middle ground, he has explained that he does not abuse classical texts but that such scripts, coming with few performance instructions, are fundamentally ambiguous and hence open to interpretation.76
Loved or loathed, his Julius Caesar made it to the West End and several members of the OCSC were nurtured by Miller beyond that.77 Besides helping Donald Macintyre find a journalistic job in the USA, he ensured James-Moore was hired as a manager at the Mermaid and Alan Strachan (who claims to have been the worst Fabian ever in Twelfth Night) became assistant director there, before going on to run Greenwich Theatre and become a West End director. Strachan holds that Miller taught both him and John Madden the crucial importance of creating a relaxed rehearsal-room atmosphere. As for Andrew Hilton (who played Old Hamlet’s ghost), he now runs Bristol’s acclaimed company, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, and he concludes:
Jonathan certainly sowed the seed of what I am doing now. He said to me once that he’d love to assemble a Shakespeare ensemble in a cockpit, to do high-definition productions with virtually nothing but the actors and the words. I thought, ‘Yes, I’d like to be part of that.’ Of course, he never did it, but here I am decades later [doing just that].
While collaborating happily with students, Miller was increasingly in demand as a headline-making professional director, in Nottingham as well as at the Mermaid. In a letter to Oliver Sacks, he wrote, ‘The psychic energy required for these enterprises is so large that at the end of the day there is really nothing left.’78 White as a sheet with dark rings under his eyes, he looked like exhaustion incarnate, yet he was thriving in perpetual motion too. Repeatedly zooming up to the Midlands, he was personally benefiting from this paradisal era in provincial theatre and, in turn, helping to boost the Playhouse’s national standing. To Sacks he explained:
I went to Nottingham in the first place out of desperation since none of the big institutions here in London or Stratford were willing to employ me. However, it turns out to have been the best thing I ever did. It publicly demonstrated the satisfactory completion of my apprenticeship . . . I now feel ready to tackle almost anything.79
He greatly enjoyed the company of the Playhouse’s artistic director, Stuart Burge, who had a touch of Great Escape glamour about him, having been captured during World War 2’s Italian Campaign. Miller counts him among a handful of ADs for whom he has felt unconditional affection.80
Working for Burge, he also broadened his repertoire, enhancing his reputation as an anti-romantic and blackly humorous director of classic plays, beginning with Sheridan’s comedy of manners, The School for Scandal. Stripping away the layers of varnish – the encrusted theatrical conventions of chocolate-box prettiness and fluttering lace – he pictured Georgian minor gentry living in dank, flea-ridden squalor.81 He simultaneously intensified the satire by aping William Hogarth and James Gillray’s grotesque caricatures.
Thereafter, he resurrected The Malcontent, John Marston’s long-forgotten gem from 1603 wherein a deposed duke, adopting another identity, bitterly lampoons a decadent court. Seeing it as a surreal, seventeenth-century Goon Show but more ghoulish, Miller had white-faced, black-lipped courtiers capering around amidst trompe l’oeil colonnades, at once carnivalesque and macabre. This production went from the Playhouse to London, opening Sam Wanamaker’s festive Globe season, which was staged in a tent by the Thames as part of the campaign to get Shakespeare’s wooden ‘O’ reconstructed on its original site.82
Miller staged his first play by Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, at Nottingham. Just prior to that, he had won relevant credentials when John Gielgud invited him to direct From Chekhov with Love, a star-studded biodrama for commercial TV, which used letters to tell the playwright’s life story. Gielgud played Anton Chekhov with Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Tutin as his wife and sister. Wendy Hiller was his would-be mistress, a character added in the course of Miller’s production. Technical problems were still being caused by colour film at this time and the production’s 24 backdrops, intended to be in the style of Sickert paintings, were so demanding that they almost sparked trade union action.83 By comparison, the dramatization was very simply managed, with the cast mainly stationary, turned away from each other as they spoke their epistolary exchanges.84
As for The Seagull, his Nottingham production was rated as surpassing anything in London, a delicate study of human disappointments with Peter Eyre as Konstantin, the underloved son of the theatrical diva Madame Arkadina.85 The country estate by the lake was beautifully evoked with gauzes and projected images which created translucent, deep perspectives. Hereafter, Miller would often employ such techniques, fusing his love of film and photography with his stage work, nudging towards what is now called multimedia theatre.
He was pursuing a bold line in casting as well, giving substantial classical roles to performers generally categorized as comedians or character actors, a trend that many of today’s star comics wish to perpetuate. Fenella Fielding, from revue and the Carry On films, was his Arkadina. The Times took exception, declaring that the cast went for laughs and were far too British.86 Yet actors who have worked with Miller believe he and Chekhov are soulmates, not just as a doctor-director and a doctor-dramatist. They feel the former is at home among the samovars, having the dark and absurdist side and all the intelligence vital to such plays, perhaps because of his family’s roots in the Russian Pale of Settlement.87
Personally, he identifies with Chekhov as a medically trained, unsentimental observer of life, with an eye for behavioural nuances.88 As for being Russian at heart, he emphasizes, first, that any British production will inevitably reflect British society and, second, that his ancestry has no bearing. His grandparents, from poor Jewish shtetls, had nothing to do with the world of Arkadina. All the same, he was reacting against Chekhov productions of the English school which he terms ‘Keats Grove genteel’.89 He wanted to inject more Slavic eruptive gaiety and shabbiness. Indeed, he sought out authentic advice from an expert, Tania Alexander, who was born in St Petersburg just before the Bolshevik Revolution. The daughter of Moura Budberg – Russian aristocrat, writer and quondam lover of Maxim Gorky – Alexander would continue to work with Miller for many years, whenever he directed Chekhov or other East European dramas and operas.90
As for his Nottingham Playhouse King Lear, Michael Hordern took the title role, following his turn as the muttering professor in Whistle and I’ll Come to You and giving what is now regarded as the performance of a lifetime.91 His royal patriarch was a comical old codger and ferociously ratty geriatric, slipping into senility and abdicating as a crisis gesture when feeling undervalued. Miller saw Lear as a paranoiac depressive, insatiably wanting love yet practically inviting Cordelia’s rejection of him by setting up the praise-game in the first place.92 She declines to give him, so to speak, a filial rave review.
As with Prometheus Bound, certain critics cried out for more heightened passion and cosmic reverberations, saying this was Lear seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The director’s riposte is that people get ridiculously carried away by the thundering storm scene. He mocks ‘Wagnerian Stonehenge’ productions, regarding them as the relics of nineteenth-century, grandiose traditions.93 His love of Victorian scientists contrasts with his scorn for that era’s ham-dram. His staging centred on very real family relationships, with neither Lear nor Cordelia being romanticized.94 No idealized pre-Raphaelite heroine, he had the young princess played with a cold, stubborn streak by Penelope Wilton (in her first major role).
He transposed the action from Ancient Britain to the century of authorship because, as he saw it, Shakespeare’s play (from circa 1603) foreshadowed imminent political upheavals, rather like Chekhov’s pre-revolutionary dramas. Written just 40 years before the English kingdom collapsed in the Civil War, the play seems to anticipate Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan which was written during that conflict. Out on the heath, Lear has regressed into the pre-civilized state of nature where, as Hobbes put it, life is nasty, brutish and short.
The polity, Miller underlines, was beginning to appear unstable in the early seventeenth century, so people were starting to cast doubt on the status quo where monarchs were traditionally ranked not far below God, above lesser mortals as well as animals.95 Written into medieval jurisprudence was the notion of the king’s two bodies: namely, that the monarch was a flesh-and-blood human being, but with the authority of the (more abstract) body politic vested in him by divine right. What if the man and his status were separable, though? That had become the question.
For Miller, Lear portrays an overturning of the hierarchy on the family level and the state level, the junior subordinates disrespecting their father and sovereign simultaneously. The subject of undermined authority had likewise, of course, become a contentious topic in the countercultural late 1960s and early 1970s. With civil unrest turning violent (notably in Northern Ireland’s 1969 Battle of Bogside, as well as in America and in Paris in 1968), with proliferating wildcat strikes and with rising crime at home, crackdowns were being prescribed by some. Others cheered the era’s rebels, only to wax ambivalent on seeing certain of them turn into terrorists or despots (such as the Baader-Meinhof gang and the ‘Brotherly Leader’ of the 1969 Libyan Revolution, Muammar Gaddafi).96
In the rehearsal room, meanwhile, Miller’s cast loved his egalitarian style. ‘He’s not worried about his status,’ says Wilton, ‘therefore you’re all in it together.’ Frank Middlemass (who played Lear’s Fool) likewise commented: ‘He’s formidably intelligent but as silly as anybody, daft as a brush and great company.’ In this context then, he was a kind of Leveller with a common touch or – to use the popular Seventies jargon – an easygoing Type B personality rather than a competitive, ambitious Type A.
Middlemass’ Fool was wonderfully tragicomic and superannuated, with a touch of battered cockney vaudevillian about him. Implicitly Lear’s companion from boyhood, he looked curiously like Hordern’s double, smeared with a clown’s white make-up, functioning as the king’s cautionary mirror image. Additionally, Miller was interested in the Fool and Gloucester’s disruptive bastard son, Edmund, as two jokers in the pack, as interstitial or marginalized characters who look askance from the boundaries, not quite socially integrated, sardonically mocking.97
The director acknowledges a personal analogy, remarking on his later revivals of this same play: ‘Perhaps I’ve seen my own grumpiness, vis-à-vis my own children, in Lear and perhaps that has enriched some of the quarrels with the daughters. “Daughter, do not make me mad!”’
Regarding his parents, he emphasizes, ‘It didn’t relate to my father at all. No, never, never in any way.’ Even if he had been distressed by his mother’s dementia, he insists his professional experience of senile lunatics, as a medic, was the key.98 Wilton remembers him telling them about one old gent in a geriatric ward, being visited by his daughter and politely getting out of bed to walk her to the door at the end, unaware that he was naked. His productions have a wonderful immediacy, Wilton says, because he supplies his actors with such graphic details.
Miller stresses that, among the many books which have fed into his work, he is absolutely beholden to the writings of Erving Goffman.99 The American ethologist studied the tiny idiosyncrasies of people’s social, non-verbal behaviour, and those, Miller contends, are precisely what most theatre productions lack. He elucidates:
It led on from my interest in [J. L.] Austin’s ‘Plea for Excuses’, because Goffman drew particular attention to apologies and remedial behaviour in public places: someone tripping in the street and going back to inspect the pavement in order to deflect the accusation that he is a fool; people going down to the last possible point to wave departing guests goodbye to avoid seeming rude, or disappearing under a smokescreen of mimed future engagements (He comically puts an imaginary phone to his ear, followed by a thumbs-up.) . . .
There’s also a vast fringe or penumbra of behaviour called ‘subintentional actions’, seemingly negligible actions, like now: someone will be talking and absent-mindedly twiddling their ear lobe . . .100 People don’t normally pay attention to these things and don’t miss them if they are not in a performance but, when they are, the audience has a sense that five staves of the behavioural score have been filled. It’s like an orchestral score: you may not notice the woodwind’s note under the strings’ melody but it enriches the harmonic structure.
Hordern’s performance as Lear was full of tiny Goffmanesque touches and it matured too, for he was to reprise the role for Miller in two subsequent versions filmed for television.101 In the meantime, the Nottingham Playhouse production transferred, at Laurence Olivier’s special invitation, to the Old Vic. Here the drama pundit Martin Esslin judged it the most lucid rendition of the play in living memory.102
Ken Tynan had been recruited from the critics’ ranks to join the National Theatre team, working as Olivier’s literary adviser and right-hand man. As soon as he had seen Lear in Nottingham, he proposed Miller as the perfect director for The Merchant of Venice, because Sir Laurence’s wife, Joan Plowright, was wanting to play Portia. Her husband might well have dismissed Tynan’s idea, for he had been unamused by Beyond the Fringe’s spoof of enervating Old Vic productions of Shakespeare.
JON: So even now while we to the wanton lute do strut
Is brutish Bolingbroke bent fair upon
Some fickle circumstance . . .
Get thee to Gloucester, Essex. Do thee to Wessex, Exeter.
Fair Albany to Somerset must eke his route
And Scroop do you to Westmoreland, where shall bold York
Enrouted now for Lancaster with forces of our Uncle Rutland
Enjoin his standard with sweet Norfolk’s host . . .
I most royally shall now to bed
To sleep off all the nonsense I’ve just said.103
Olivier had further been exasperated by the Fringers’ uncontrollable giggles when they were guests together on the ITV arts programme Tempo.104 Worse still, Miller’s unflattering comments about his blacked-up Othello, casually confided in a journalist, had appeared in print.105
Consequently, when the phone rang and the caller at the other end of the line claimed to be the great man, Miller assumed it was a joke. As he explains: ‘I heard this voice saying, “Dear boy, I would like you to do The Merchant of Venice for Joanie” and I thought it was Alan Bennett or Peter Cook pulling my leg. Well, he grew rather impatient and said, “No, no, it is Laurence Olivier!” . . . I managed to say, “I’d love to do it”.’
Soon the veteran star announced that he was going to join Plowright, taking the part of Shylock. This scotched the rumour that he was retiring after his battle with cancer, and he turned up at the first read-through already word-perfect.106 Unfortunately, he came bearing a bag of facial appendages that appalled Miller: the stock-in-trade hooked nose, orthodox ringlets, and a costly set of jutting teeth which were apparently based on a Jewish member of the NT board.107 The duo, as a result, got off to a sticky start, but Miller managed to wean Olivier off his worst accessories, with the actor enthusiastically concurring: ‘In this play, dear boy, we must at all costs avoid offending the Hebrews. God, I love them so!’108 He was allowed to keep the teeth, which were not especially Jewish in any case. Sir Laurence loved his dentures so, he used to wander around the corridors and give press interviews with them in, to see if people noticed.
He was very taken with the idea of an 1890s Shylock who would appear assimilated at first glance, and who could have a hint of Disraeli or of the emergent Rothschild dynasty about him. In his dapperness, this Shylock was also like Miller’s own grandfather, the smart-suited merchant and bank man Simon Spiro.109 Thus, the director’s ancestral backstory of complex assimilation fed into this staging, alongside his broader historical allusions to the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair; to the Count de Primoli’s vintage photographs of Venice; and to Hannah Arendt’s thesis that modern anti-Semitism grew out of nineteenth-century capitalism.110
The production essentially made Shylock and his child, Jessica, ‘Jew-ish’ in different and conflicting ways. Having read William Empson’s literary criticism and absorbed – via John Barton and Karl Miller – some of the close-reading skills associated with F. R. Leavis at Cambridge, Miller was now bringing those to bear on his Shakespeare productions. His Merchant of Venice implied that ‘Jewish’ or ‘Jew-ish’ was a complex word, almost in the Empsonian sense. Explicitly, when working on the script, he discussed the ambiguities of the term ‘kind’ (sometimes meaning ‘kin’, sometimes meaning ‘compassionate’, but often barbed in context).111
Olivier’s Shylock was a clean-shaven man, with a morning coat, wing collar and attaché case, barely distinguishable from Antonio’s fraternity of mercenary Christian gentlemen. At the same time he was, as one critic noted, a divided self.112 He was seen donning a prayer shawl at home – not so far from Spiro and Emanuel Miller on the Sabbath. In turn, Jane Lapotaire’s Jessica, having shown signs of an anti-father complex and having rejected Shylock’s world, was not absorbed into a happy-ever-after fairytale ending in Belmont.113 Becoming the focus of the final scene, she was visibly shocked to hear of her parent’s ruination and was left ambivalently hovering outside Portia’s mansion, distantly hearing a sung kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) and perhaps regretting the frivolous life she had chosen.114 Presumably Miller thought Emanuel would draw his own parallels. In a letter to Sacks, he exclaimed: ‘Thank God my father is too lame to get into the theatre!’115
The general public flocked to see the production and, having been tentatively scheduled for just seven performances, it was soon being debated keenly and called the most important theatrical event of the year.116 Besides transferring for an extended run to the NT’s newly-acquired, second auditorium in the West End, the Cambridge Theatre, The Merchant was filmed, broadcast on television and sold in the new format of video.117
Olivier was delighted. He adored the electrifying bits of stage business which his director had suggested, not least the gleeful jig into which Shylock launched on hearing of Antonio’s wrecked fleet. That was loosely based on Hitler’s stomp of triumph at France’s defeat, recorded on a wartime newsreel. Olivier conversely let out an unforgettable, desolate wail after his final exit from the trial scene, defeated.118 He wrote in his memoirs, a decade later: ‘Jonathan excited us beyond measure by the limitless variety, the originality, and the fascinating colour in the expression of his ideas. He was the only man; we were thrilled by him and remain so.’119
The actor further revealed that working on The Merchant had helped him recover from five years of crippling stage fright. There were hairy moments during the initial performances as the sweat-drenched luminary downed tranquillizers to stop himself leaping on the first bus home. He begged his fellow actors not to look directly at him and, on one occasion, he almost forgot what a Jew hath. Miller recalls standing in the wings and glimpsing his terrified eyes staring out as if from behind a mask.120
Having got through that, Olivier recognized that this young director had given him a new lease of life, reinvigorating his reputation as a great Shakespearean actor by daring to show the king of British theatre some healthy disrespect. ‘I remember Jonathan’, he said, ‘being ruthless in his criticism of some of my [characteristically inflected] line readings. It came as quite a shock to begin with, until I slowly began to realise . . . I’d made a mountain out of mannerisms . . . and ended up impersonating myself . . . Miller opened my eyes and made me look in the mirror again.’121
This was a complex kind of paternal-filial relationship. Sir Laurence noted that the ticking-off made him feel like the junior player or an embarrassed schoolboy, while Miller has inversely remarked: ‘He was a father to the company in every sense of the word – positive and negative. In the years I worked for the National, I had all those complicated, equivocal feelings that sons have for their fathers.’122 He goes on to say:
He was not a father figure exactly, but he had a paternal intimacy with everyone. There was, of course, a remoteness and competitiveness and there may well have been Machiavellian scheming with regard to others . . . in his own generation. But he was encouraging, amiable and extremely convivial, drifting into the canteen with his saucer over his coffee-cup to keep it warm, sitting down for a chat. He didn’t lock himself away. I tell you what it was like: it was like a small bomber command squadron in those Nissen huts [the company’s makeshift offices] at the back of Aquinas Street . . . The chaps were ready to scramble for this ’ere Flight Commander Olivier . . .
I had a very good time with him and Joan Plowright too, going down with the family to stay at the weekend in Brighton [their country home]. I remember Tom, who must have been eight or nine, saying this wonderful thing on the phone to a friend, having to put off a sleepover and muddling up the name Sir Laurence Olivier. He said, ‘I can’t come because Dad’s taking us down to meet his friend Roland Saliva’ . . . They were very hospitable. He had this sort of patrician hospitality and a real interest in all his staff’s welfare which, in turn, generated enormous filial affection and admiration.