In Two Minds

His daughter Sarah, who never married and administered most of the home care, believed that he felt both proud and jealous of his firstborn, yet was too inhibited to admit this.² To his son, he sounded like a perpetually nagging conscience: ‘Well, have you decided what you are going to do?’ Emanuel’s disapproval and his final, vehement self-reproach caused Miller to have a mid-life crisis and make a U-turn. Or that is what it looked like, for he abruptly went back to work on medical matters.

He had been on a terrific roll. The year 1970 had been the busiest of his theatrical career. Just to clarify the sequence of events as he zigzagged between venues, King Lear had transferred from Nottingham to the Old Vic in February, The Merchant opened in April and transferred to the Cambridge Theatre, while he was staging his Mermaid Tempest for June. His father died in July. By October, as the startled press reported, he was holed up researching the history of medicine, back at University College.³ It was as if he had been immediately haunted by guilt, a feeling perhaps exacerbated by having to rehearse Hamlet with the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company in September – those scenes with Old Hamlet’s ghost which he pored over so obsessively.⁴

It was not, though, purely his father’s death that effected Miller’s return to science.6 He was commissioned by the Fontana Modern Masters series to pen the Sherrington monograph; the mesmerism book had long been on the back burner; and the UCL post was set up, on hold, some months before he was bereaved. Nevertheless, the impression remains that he was suddenly spurred, with a sharpened awareness of his own mortality.⁷

His period as a researcher produced a body of scholarly work. Setting aside mesmerism, Rivers, Head and Sherrington for a moment, he first completed another Fontana Modern Masters volume. This one was about Marshall McLuhan, who had been regarded by many in the 1960s as a bleeding-edge academic guru, having famously proclaimed ‘the medium is the message’.⁸ Miller’s book, McLuhan, acknowledged that this analyst of the electronic media boom had been eye-opening, but then it examined his hyperboles and traced the roots of his ideas, exposing him as a personally slanted and less than original thinker. Turning his hand to biographical investigation, the craft in which Betty had excelled, Miller discussed McLuhan’s Canadian roots, his Catholic faith and the influence of his Cambridge mentors from the 1930s.⁹ The New York Review of Books judged this demolition of the man’s repute to be more important than anything he himself ever wrote.¹⁰ What is most surprising is that Miller and his subject had been friends. Seeing the publication as a betrayal, McLuhan never spoke to him again.

Moving on to act as commissioning editor on another book, Freud: The Man, His World, His Influence, Miller gathered together a collection of expert essays. Offering breadth of perspective and background detailing, they investigated Sigmund’s Vienna, the strict physiological training from which he departed, and his connections with philosophers, surrealists and Marx.¹¹ While Freud’s massive impact was collectively recognized, one trenchant contribution from Dr Henry Miller (no relation) was soon being referred to as the strongest succinct case ever made against his theories – another reputation crushed.¹² Well reviewed, Freud: The Man, His World, His Influence elicited only a few digs about how Dr J. Miller’s introduction sounded subconsciously anxious and how his self-styled ‘careless flamboyance’, as commissioner, came with inattentive proofreading.¹³

His truly angst-ridden tussle was with the Sherrington monograph, a commission that brought on dreadful writer’s block, a kind of literary stammer. Oliver Sacks’ memories of this time are poignant, for he himself became a bestselling doctor-author thanks to Miller. Speaking about his own shaky period as a young medical researcher, he recalls:

I sent this box of my writings to Jonathan [in 1960], asking him to do the right thing if I died . . . I was not only self-destructive but negligent or destructive of many of my manuscripts. I think the original manuscript of Awakenings got destroyed in 1969. I had mercifully given a carbon copy to Jonathan but forgotten this. In 1972, he took it over the road to his neighbour, the publisher Colin Haycraft. Then Colin said he loved it . . . and this becomes my own story now. However, it was Jonathan who, in fact, saved my writings.14

Awakenings became an international hit and was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Sacks thereby bridged the science/drama divide in his own way, later progressing to his stage collaborations with Peter Brook.¹⁵

To return to Miller’s writer’s block, Sacks describes staying with him in Scotland in the early 1970s. As he recollects:

In the mornings Jonathan would work on Sherrington. One would hear sheets of paper being torn out of the typewriter, crumpled and flung on the ground. Then he would come down at lunchtime, scarlet in the face with his blood pressure, one felt, sky-high . . . [as if] he was somehow beating up Sherrington, beating up the typewriter. It seems that major ambivalences were involved . . . I don’t think Jonathan likes the idea of ‘masters’ very much.

The revered neurologist proved just too nerve-wracking and the monograph was eventually abandoned.¹⁶ Miller is still kicking himself, exclaiming that he is ‘a total chaos’ at writing.

Many lectures given during his UC fellowship years and thereafter have, similarly, not materialized in print because he could not commit them to paper. Speaking extempore, he is often scintillating on the rostrum though only half-finished when it is time to stop, having got so carried away at finding himself ‘unblocked’.¹⁷ Rachel humorously recalls one august institution attempting, hopelessly, to make a cassette-recording as Miller darted out from behind the lectern, fizzing with ideas.

He confesses that he nearly broke down trying to prepare for the high-powered Cambridge Clark Lectures. Similar agonies preceded his 1971 address, given to the British Academy, on the subject of censorship, which had become controversial again, being linked to law-and-order concerns and the new libertinism.¹⁸ Miller’s argument was lucid enough, concluding that excessive images of permissive behaviour, and indeed satire, could have a corrosive effect but that society should not be paranoid. He, nevertheless, endured ‘sleepless and desperate nights’ in the run-up to the talk. As he recorded in a letter to Sacks, the panic gave way to ‘a hanged man’s indifference [on the day itself] . . . a state of mesmerised tranquillity. The lecture’, he explained, ‘then flowed out of me like a venous haemorrhage and I recovered consciousness precisely sixty minutes after I had started’.¹⁹

As with the Sherrington script, his book on mesmerism was never completed, and he partly blames University College for that. He complains that he was ill-nurtured, insufficiently encouraged and wretched. This sounds almost like a reprise of his infant-school days. In any case, being stuck in a windowless study only proved to him that he was a roving intellectual by nature, not a nose-to-the-grindstone academic.²⁰

‘Going Unconscious’ and ‘A Gower Street Scandal’ are transcripts of two lectures depicting Franz Mesmer and University College’s first professor of medicine, John Elliotson.21 Miller related how Mesmer, circa 1767, qualified as a physician and then took up unorthodox experimental practices, claiming he could curatively affect patients’ mysterious inner ether by moving magnets across their bodies or, indeed, by just passing his hands over them. Derided by establishment colleagues and censored by France’s Academy of Sciences, Mesmer became a celebrity nonetheless. Avid crowds flocked to his ‘séances’ where, ‘in a robe embroidered with Rosicrucian alchemical symbols,’ as Miller colourfully put it, ‘he stalked the darkened rooms to the accompaniment of a glass harmonica and actively encouraged his clients to luxuriate in their convulsive crises [i.e. fits and trances]’. Mesmer’s cult grew, we are told, ‘precisely because it was the subject of official criticism . . . [as] fringe remedies are today’.²²

Elliotson was at the centre of a comparable scandal in the 1830s. The eminent physician was, according to Miller, a volatile divided man, attracted to subversive causes and ‘in at least two states of mind’, being a rational materialist with spiritual yearnings.²³ Taking to mesmerism after his mother’s death, with a proselytizing verve, he held his ‘séances’ in UCH’s lecture theatre and opened them to the public. Being subsequently mocked in the Lancet and condemned by the outraged Royal Society of Physicians, he was forced to resign.

What catches the eye is that Miller, the showbiz renegade/reformed scientist, should choose to research these shockingly theatrical medics. This is not to say that his lectures are, any more than his productions, heavily autobiographical. However, his accounts of Mesmer and Elliotson’s activities are lightly strewn with words that echo his own career path: ‘establishment’ and ‘fringe’, ‘unorthodox’ and ‘subversive’, ‘frivolous’ and ‘incontinent festivities’ (referring to the séances). His tone, regarding their work, is mercurial, repeatedly shifting between disparagement, amusement and appreciative sympathy.²⁴

The lurking autobiographical element here is that Man: The Double Animal sees Miller, in the wake of Emanuel’s death, contemplating fathers on multiple levels, with a critical and an admiring eye.²⁷ Neurologically, he was discussing how traces of our ancestors have been detected in our bodies (rightly or wrongly). As an academic historian, he was uncovering chains of intellectual forefathers. More personally – carrying on the line, in a way – he was teaching his audience about Dr E. Miller’s tutors.

That said, this lecture did not dwell on Emanuel at all. It did not directly discuss his connection with Rivers and Head.²⁸ If anything, Miller’s time studying the history of medicine at UC served as a remote filial salutation, one at several removes from his father’s work. Today he states that he was not really affected by the death of either of his parents and that he was, in a sense, relieved of a burden because of Emanuel’s rheumatic suffering. Nonetheless, he admits to having cried occasionally about things that could have been articulated, ‘if only we’d had this talk, or something of that sort’.²⁹ He recollects:

I had one dream of my father. Some years after he died, Rachel and I went to Pompeii. We walked around this deserted city of the dead in this bright, cold, winter sunshine . . . and that night I suddenly dreamed and woke crying . . . I was at a kerbside café [in the dream], just outside Central Hall, opposite Westminster Abbey and – through the passing traffic – I saw my father in his Royal Army Medical Corps uniform, a Sam Browne belt and a peaked cap partly shadowing his face. He had a leather swagger stick in his hand with which he lightly tipped the rim of his cap and sort of saluted me across the street . . . I tried to cross the road, to speak to him, but the crowd bore him away . . .

Something to do with having not had a connection with him, I suppose, and wishing for a reconciliation. I don’t know. But it came unexpectedly, as a result of these other dead people – as if he had come back with that multitude of the dead – and he never returned again.

Ronald Pickup, who played Saint-Just opposite Christopher Plummer’s dissipated Danton, remembers Miller’s rehearsals being like highly entertaining seminars, so brilliant that the play almost got in the way.³² Plummer explains further:

What is so fabulous is how Jonathan deals with the work from an oblique angle. He would tell stories or talk anthropology or medicine . . . but it was always applicable. He never interfered in your world, the matter of acting . . . You took from his world.

John Shrapnel, who was to appear in a string of Miller productions, adds a point about academic ideas and humorous demonstrations, observing that some actors can get slightly intimidated because this director is a polymorphous mimic and will act out, say, ‘a Jonathan cartoon version’ of remedial behaviour from Erving Goffman’s books. ‘But he does this’, says Shrapnel, ‘to the point where everybody is in hysterics . . . Then later, when your performance needs something completely off the loop, you realize he’s given it to you.’

Watching Miller in rehearsals somewhat disproves the claim that he dispenses no instructions.³³ His enactments of bits of business get imitated, such that some performers’ moves and gestures end up looking discernibly Milleresque. Even so, as Shrapnel observes, he mostly directs indirectly, through the medium of the joke and the roundabout chat.³⁴

After Danton’s Death, he restaged The School for Scandal for the NT company, with Denis Quilley modelling his manners on Ned Sherrin as Benjamin Backbite. That character and his uncle were cheekily turned into a camp couple. In spite of that, the critic from the Observer dismissed the production as the National in its respectable, dour middle period.³⁵ Miller replied with a personal missive about the dreary, middle-aged Helen Dawson. That was needless really, since others’ glowing reviews ensured the show was a hit.³⁶ In any case, he was palpably delighted to be back, like the scholastic Hamlet fraternizing once more with Wittenberg’s travelling players. As Shrapnel remarks: ‘Sometimes you read articles where Jonathan seems to be looking down his nose at theatre . . . but that’s never what you perceive in rehearsal.³⁷ He’s like a rat up an alley – he loves it!’

Soon after, he was invited to work on The Taming of the Shrew with Joan Plowright, for the NT’s summer season in Chichester. The character of Kate is ferocious, of course, and British second-wave feminism had just been revved up by the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.³⁹ Plowright was a relative pussycat. Apparently it was Anthony Hopkins, playing Petruchio, who seemed to be wildly neurotic, pacing round the theatre for hours before each performance.⁴⁰ Miller also remounted The Seagull at this venue, with Peter Eyre and Penelope Wilton joined by Irene Worth as a frisky Arkadina, and with Robert Stephens as her lover. It was so successful that in 1973, when the Festival Theatre was seeking a new artistic director, Miller was rumoured to be on the short list. That came to nothing.⁴¹

The same year, Peter Hall moved from his reign at the RSC to run the National Theatre Company, sharing power with and then succeeding the displeased, ailing Olivier. As artistic director, Hall dispensed with Tynan but promoted Miller to the rank of associate director. When this was announced, Miller jubilantly predicted a more vibrant and less autocratic theatre world. He publicly rejoiced that the NT’s new team members, including associates Michael Blakemore, Harold Pinter and John Schlesinger, were an exciting prospect, much younger and very close.⁴²

Yet Miller v. Hall was to become one of the most notorious feuds in recent British theatre history.⁴³ Sir Peter thinks his antagonist, together with Blakemore, took on the role of a conspirator and a ringleader for the ‘enemies within’, encouraging hostility to his leadership through backbiting and nostalgia for Olivier’s era.⁴⁴ It is as if Hall were Julius Caesar, or the loathed stepfather, Claudius, usurping Sir Laurence’s Old Hamlet. Miller referred to his takeover as a putsch.⁴⁵ Sir Peter has compared the situation to scurrilous dogs snapping round his ankles.⁴⁶ While underlining that he has ‘always liked Jonathan’ and bears no grudge, he says:

I made a great mistake thinking he was a friend . . . Both of them [Miller and Blakemore] had absolutely hysterical and vitriolic opposition to my appointment . . . And they did very little except try and mess up whatever I was trying to do, frankly. Of all the people that I’ve known, Jonathan has done me more public damage in terms of the media than anybody else. I mean, he’s been obsessive . . . I think he is so brilliant that he has great difficulty in accepting any form of authority or criticism or influence over him, always finding authority to be stupid or ridiculous. There’s a kind of hysterical contempt.

Measure was a very happy experience, a touring production with no superiors peering over his shoulder. He relished the offbeat venues, not least one civic hall where the manager greeted him with, ‘Will you need the microphone to introduce your acts, Mr Miller?’⁴⁹ He was positively inspired by the small budget. For the set, he lugged old doors off a building site with his designer Bernard Culshaw, and updating the action to Freud’s interwar Vienna made ingenious sense. The Duke, watching from corners, was like an analyst sitting back and putting Vienna on the couch.⁵⁰

Miller’s ‘knee scene’ was electrifying too. Instead of a blatant attempt at sexual assault in the governor’s office, Julian Currie’s Angelo was creepily repressed, just fingering the hem of Isabella’s skirt as she (played by Gillian Barge) sat frozen rigid with horror. Hall agreed, in his diary, that this was a very good production, the best he had seen by Miller, and an extended run was duly planned at the Old Vic.⁵¹

The Marriage of Figaro, penned by the French playwright Beaumarchais before Mozart’s opera version, did not turn out so well. Some reviewers were appreciative. They found Gawn Grainger a convincing pre-French Revolutionary member of the Angry Brigade, playing the titular manservant who is irked by his master.⁵² Many complained, though, of longueurs, insufficiently grand aristos, stylistic inconsistencies and weird bagpipes (actually period instruments). Harold Hobson was baying for blood in the Sunday Times, calling the director a mediocrity who should be sacked.⁵³ Miller’s fortieth birthday, that same month, must have been pretty glum, especially as his employers had not supportively leaped to the production’s defence as expected.⁵⁴

After this, he and the National (which was under fire for other poor shows) failed miserably with its premiere of The Freeway. Peter Nichols remembers being blindly convinced that his futuristic comedy, depicting Brits in a traffic jam, was going to be great. It was, unfortunately, inert. He suspects that the director swiftly realized the situation was hopeless and lost his nerve, or lost interest. Miller kept vanishing from the rehearsal room, only to be found, after a hunt, chatting in the NT offices. This is not, by the way, the only instance in his career when he has skipped or cut short rehearsals. His reasoning is that he works fast, but he sometimes describes himself as lazy.

He was particularly avoiding confrontation with the comedienne Irene Handl who kept paraphrasing her lines and was pushing to play Joan Hickson’s larger role.55 When Hall saw the dress rehearsal, he immediately insisted on drastic surgery and cut out large chunks. This came too late and the production died on its feet. Reeling from the terrible reviews, Nichols fled to America. ‘I couldn’t take it,’ he says.

Miller was to avoid new plays almost entirely after this, even though they were a significant part of the British Theatre scene in the Seventies, with active dramatists including David Hare, Edward Bond, Tom Stoppard, David Storey and David Edgar, alongside Bennett and Pinter.⁵⁶ Actually, Sarah Miller did more for that particular cause. Her jokey claim to fame, at least, was that she talent-spotted Joe Orton back in 1963 when – ignoring the instructions of her boss, the agent Peggy Ramsay – she accepted an unsolicited script from this curious young man in a plastic mac who walked in one lunchtime. Inside the unmarked envelope which he gave her was Entertaining Mr Sloane.

Nichols is retrospectively humorous about The Freeway bombing, yet still blames Hall, in part, for persuading him and Miller to pair up in the first place, by assuring each of them that the other was eager to collaborate.⁵⁷ Miller vaguely recollects it was, in fact, Olivier who first urged him to do The Freeway. Nevertheless, he believes that Sir Peter then used it as a second elephant trap to drag him down, along with the Figaro. ‘Hall had known perfectly well’, he surmises, ‘that the Figaro would completely fuck me up, and it did. I wrecked myself. He had known that all the audience hear [with Beaumarchais’ play] is the absence of Mozart’s music. And he had just had a huge success with the opera at Glyndebourne.’

Even if some accuse Hall of having been a power-loving Machiavellian, he sounds staggered at the elephant-trapping charge, exclaiming:

That is completely unfair! He wanted to do the Beaumarchais.⁵⁸ And if you think Jonathan Miller would ever do anything because somebody asked him to, think again! . . . I think that’s advanced paranoia. These strange conspiracy theories that he has . . . I don’t know what it comes from. I mean, he needs to be persecuted, he really does . . . No, he did a very bad production of the Beaumarchais: [that] is the truth. Both Blakemore and Jonathan did very unsuccessful work and there’s nothing to breed discontent like failure, and they couldn’t bear it, actually, and they wanted to blame me, I think, for their own failures. But I would say that!

He goes on to highlight that it was not just the productions spiralling downwards. The crucial offstage problem was that Miller could not endure the new style of open government that required him to sit down and collectively discuss his ideas with Harold Pinter and John Schlesinger. Miller ripostes that Sir Peter, whom he nicknamed Genghis Khan, did not institute open government at all.

Peter Hall wanted big, with all this rhetoric about ‘centres of excellence’, but it seemed to me this great National Theatre, with all its multiple facilities and lobby events, was like a Brent Cross Shopping Centre for the arts. Centres of excellence are not created by fiat. I thought the National Theatre should no more be located on the South Bank than the National Health should be located in St Thomas’ Hospital. I said that, rather than dramatic cathedrals, there should be a Congregationalist movement in which we have theatrical chapels. In other words, ‘The National Theatre’ is the name that should be given to twenty or thirty theatres throughout the country, because you never know where excellence is going to erupt.59

Today Miller’s vision has, to an extent, been realized by the National Theatre of Scotland and National Theatre Wales, neither of which occupy a grand theatre building, instead staging productions countrywide. At the time, the divergence of his values from Hall’s led to intensifying dislike. He used to allude to the high-rise apartment where Sir Peter lived, in the newly built Barbican complex, as ‘Satan Towers’.⁶⁰ Describing a dinner party for NT associates there, he recalls that everyone had to lunge for their supper, swinging around in those trendy, Seventies, hanging chairs. He adds:

This sort of cordon bleu deb cooked the meal, then he took us out on to the balcony from where we could see the McAlpine [construction company’s] sign haemorrhaging rhythmically in the fog, over the South Bank. We had these big whisky glasses and he raised his towards the sign, saying, ‘Gentlemen, that’s what we’re all about!’ And I realized then that he was full of bullshit.

Miller’s critics point out that he was a shamelessly snooty, intellectual aristocrat – born to the purple, as it were – referring to Hall (the son of a station master) as a cultural arriviste. He himself acknowledges that he is an old Bloomsbury snob. He believes in the aristocracy of excellence, he says, and Hall struck him as a vulgar mediocrity with whom he just couldn’t work.⁶¹ Miller the Leveller is meshed with Miller the elitist.

Shifting the focus back to the boardroom issue, Hall stresses that what really damaged Miller was a pivotal clash in 1974, not with him but with Harold Pinter. In spite of the playwright’s past admiration for The Drinking Party, he and the loquacious director proved to be antipathetic. The renowned master of the threatening pause took particular umbrage at Miller’s plan for an all-male production of The Importance of Being Earnest and interrogated him. What was this casting trying to prove? Was it implying that, secretly, Wilde wished he could write a homosexual play?⁶³ These days such a reading would hardly be questioned, but Pinter deemed it disrespectful to the text.⁶⁴ His censorship must have been particularly frustrating given that Miller had been a laddy drag act himself, back in Footlights, and McKern had been so wonderful as Alice’s Ugly Duchess.

No minutes of the fractious meeting are to be found. However, several letters in the NT’s archive of internal documents are now open to scrutiny, three decades having passed. An enthusiastic early missive sent from Hall to Miller refers to production ideas and says, ‘I loved your experimental IMPORTANCE.’⁶⁵ In a further message, dispatched shortly before the crucial meeting, Hall informed Miller that certain associates were expressing some anxiety – ‘worry which I do not share’.⁶⁶ This somewhat qualifies his memoirs where he records that the all-male idea was ‘firmly squashed’ in the meeting because it ‘seemed to me, and to all those present, a touch mad’.⁶⁷ Correspondence from Pinter to Hall indicates that the issue was, in fact, still dragging on approximately a fortnight later. His letter said:

I was very relieved to hear that Jonathan had concluded that there was no justification for an all male Importance, but was amazed to hear last night [in a theatre bar] that Michael Jayston is still going to play Lady Bracknell. I suggest that this is no more than a silly gimmick and that in a National Theatre production it is nothing less than disreputable . . . [I] do not understand how [the production] could be set [on these lines] without further discussion between the associates.68

The whole thing was subsequently shelved, and that, says Hall, incurably bruised Miller’s ego. His conciliatory letter did not work.⁶⁹ It read:

I hope you weren’t too hurt over THE IMPORTANCE happenings. There is only one person to blame over the whole mess and that is me. I did not think that the Associates’ feelings would be so strong . . . Anyway, it is over and I hope with no hard feelings . . . I should think you will be glad of a slight rest.

Miller became seriously unreliable and fraught after Pinter was allowed to get the upper hand. Visibly stressed, he developed rashes and swollen glands.⁷⁰ He started skipping certain meetings and, according to Hall’s diaries, oscillated between shunning the boss and apologizing in a distraught way for his bad behaviour, saying he was shattered.

By late 1974, he was considered such an alarming loose cannon that Hall got tough and axed the long-promised transfer of Measure for Measure, blaming the chaotic South Bank building delays.⁷¹ The construction work would not be complete until 1976, and it looked as if Miller had been made redundant for the foreseeable future. A whole raft of other productions that he had planned – including Etherege’s She Would If She Could – were stymied too.⁷² That is according to Blakemore, who still feels passionately and says:

It was a disgraceful way to behave. It would have been much more honourable to say, ‘Look, we are not getting on.’ . . . It was an absolutely devastating blow to Jonathan’s belief in himself . . . He went into a kind of great gloom. He was so angry and destroyed, for about two years. It was appalling, an appalling thing.

Hall records a climactic ‘complete breast-beating scene’. This was after he had accused Miller of ‘behaving in a Coriolanus-like way’, booking himself up with work elsewhere and openly threatening to resign. Apparently, the despairing Miller then admitted that ‘he always loudmouthed against authority, was always against the father figure’.⁷³ His letter of resignation came not long after, in early 1975.⁷⁴

There is a coda on the subject of father figures. Though very convivial by comparison, the course of Miller and Olivier’s relationship had not run altogether smoothly. Sir Laurence and Tynan had considered the staging of Danton’s Death to have been so disastrously arid that they denied Miller The Bacchae.75 He directed The Malcontent at Nottingham, not the NT, because Olivier shillyshallied.⁷⁶ Moreover, Plowright had been horrified when she saw that the final proofs of Logan Gourlay’s book Olivier included a Miller interview which mixed warm praise with comment on the great man’s stubborn ego. The culprit ended up frantically handing over £700 to censor himself, paying for a reprint with his contribution excised.⁷⁷ One colleague recalls him saying he ought to kill himself, and Miller confirms:

I was extremely upset that I’d allowed myself to speak unkindly. I owed everything to him really, and he was always kind and decent and supportive to me. I would have done anything to have it taken out because I think it was ungracious and ungrateful – in a way I don’t feel about whatever I’ve said regarding Peter Hall, because he was never kind.

Olivier forgave Miller. Contrastingly, Sir Peter concludes: ‘I can’t remember, quite honestly, but if I didn’t sack him, I wish I had.’ Neither side in that dispute has ever felt he should say sorry, and the reprisals seemed to carry on for years, like some endless revenge drama.⁷⁸ Hall’s diary entries started to sound a touch paranoid, repeatedly plagued by news of his foe’s determination to carry on a guerilla campaign, using the press.⁷⁹

Blakemore laments what the NT lost. ‘I thought that Jonathan was’, he says, ‘worth his weight in gold, with this quite dazzling cross-referential mind, his ideas coming from outside the theatre. It jostled the pack. It was energising. That was Jonathan’s function.’ He sighs with reference to the power of the NT press office concluding: ‘Once I’d resigned we – both Jonathan and myself – were absolutely demonized . . . I found myself bad-mouthed in theatre boards and so forth, and I think Jonathan did too. Both of us paid a heavy price for disagreeing with Peter Hall.’ Having felt unloved at the NT, Miller would end up seeing himself as unjustifiably discarded by the British theatrical establishment as a whole.

Britain was going through a bleak spell in 1974, slipping into an economic malaise with high unemployment. Industries and homes were, furthermore, obliged to go dark due to energy shortages, an oil crisis and industrial action by miners having led to government-enforced power cuts. Miller had also been personally disappointed in the early 1970s, failing to break into the big-screen film industry. Various ideas had been floated and he had pencilled in a movie, to be made in India, adapting one of the Inspector Ghote series of detective stories. The furthest he got was talking to Marlon Brando about it in a Calais hotel.⁸⁰ He flew out to Hollywood to discuss another project with Peter Sellers, only to receive no word from him for a week. When he finally went in search, to the studios where Sellers was working, the star squinted from the set and hollered: ‘Jonathan, long time no see! What are you doing here?’81 Wasting his time, evidently.

One film did get made, which he directed under the aegis of Columbia Pictures. Take a Girl Like You was adapted by George Melly from Kingsley Amis’ novel about a northern lass and predatory males. It starred Hayley Mills and Oliver Reed but was a resounding flop.⁸² The film-making had degenerated into a ghastly farce. The bustling producer Hal E. Chester – or Hal E. Tosis as he was soon renamed – was constantly breathing down Miller’s neck and undermining his directorial authority.⁸³ Allegedly, Hal E. was so determined to sex up the footage that he slipped close-ups of groping into a deliberately distant sex scene, without so much as a by-your-leave.⁸⁴ He kept shamelessly interfering with the props too, surreptitiously turning brand labels towards the camera. Miller’s old Beyond the Fringe skits about fantastically crass film execs and product placement (performed at the initial Edinburgh International Festival run, though dropped later) now looked like premonitions.⁸⁵

Mills enjoyed the director’s idiosyncratic approach: namely, never preparing in advance. It caused major continuity problems, though, so John Bird (who played her father) had to be called back to do a bunch of completely meaningless things, such as taking three steps from the dresser to the door. Miller goes further in his own self-condemnation, saying this was just like his commercial theatre venture with Soupy Sales, an absolute nightmare and a shambles.⁸⁶ He is right. The end result was third rate. His primary motivation, to make some money, had cost him dear. He never directed another movie.⁸⁷ Melly bewailed that fact, blaming Chester’s insensitivity.

At least Miller managed to laugh with Melly about the whole fiasco. By contrast, he failed to see the funny side of ‘The Life of Dr. Jonathan’, a send-up that began to appear in Private Eye under the nom de plume John Boswells. Aping James Boswell’s biography of Samuel Johnson, this long-running column portrayed ‘the great Doctor’ pontificating ‘with his customary vigour’ at ‘his lodgings in Glos. Crescent’, surrounded by fawning ‘importunate savants’.

He was depicted as the supreme deipnosophist (a table-talker) holding forth over supper, with disciples including ‘Prof. Dworkin, the learned jurisprudent from the plantations’ and ‘Mr Geo. Melly, the critick’. This brought out how a top conversationalist like Miller, rather than truly engaging in an egalitarian two-way exchange, can reduce his interlocutors to kowtowing feeds, the unspoken rule being that they should play second fiddle. The ex-satirist was now being lampooned and perpetuating the art of British comedy by serving as the butt of the magazine’s jokes as during his Monitor stint, but more persistently. The column was, in some ways, Life and Times in NW1 rejigged.⁸⁸ Here, though, the satire was specifically targeted. It was personal.

This chimes, discomfortingly, with that sketch of the schoolboy buried in the Chesterton Society minutes book at St Paul’s: the passage where Miller was described pontificating about art, ‘twist[ing] his mouth into a wondrous sight, a despiteful pout, a chastisement of the small-minded children that sat before him, an apotheosis of the true artistic perception’. Back then, his fellow pupils were palpably enjoying his highly theatrical arrogance. Even so, the amused tone was veined with aggravation.

The painful truth is that ‘The Life of Dr. Jonathan’ was very droll, and some old friends thought Private Eye had rightly spotted full-blown self-importance in Miller, sticking a needle straight in there. Yet rather than being lanced and purged, or just shrugging it off, he was openly hurt and furious. He states that it was, in fact, this relentless ragging which made him feel really depressed and outcast by English society.⁹⁰ He saw it as a surreptitiously xenophobic hate campaign. In his opinion, the Private Eye gang are taunting, philistine, Christian bullies:

It’s like a prefects’ room at Shrewsbury, full of rancid jockstraps and canes, where swots and Jews are put down for being ‘pseudo-intellectuals’. It would be interesting to know what they would count as a genuine one . . . I suppose I am answerable to the accusation that I’m a Jack of all trades, but I’m usually called that by people who are scarcely Jacks of one. Being constantly tormented for simply expressing opinions or interests that seem too plural . . . it’s what makes England rather second-rate, and it gets you down in the end.

Whether unwisely or bravely, he has never heeded the precept that, if you must be clever in Britain, it is expedient to conceal it behind feigned modesty.⁹¹

The send-up was uncomfortably close to home as well given that Peter Cook still owned the publication. Miller assumed that he contributed substantially to the articles, and it seemed like a stab in the back ‘because’, he explains, ‘though I saw little of Peter (and he began to sort of deliquesce as he became drunk), I thought – you know – we were friends’.⁹² In the years after Beyond the Fringe, Cook had sporadically kept in touch. The Millers would occasionally have supper at his house in Hampstead, and he sometimes rang for a chat. This suggests a fondness, deep down, even if irritation and envy were in the mix. Cook’s habit of incessantly playing the joker and putting on voices warded off intimacy, but Miller remembers this with some sadness, as he does the most alcohol-sodden phone calls (one of which was vitriolic concerning his and Rachel’s ‘condescending’ visits).

Christopher Booker clarifies that it was actually he, not Wells, who compiled the column, in league with Richard Ingrams and Barry Fantoni.93 It was a wind-up of Wells, for being pally. Booker goes on to mention that he himself had once been friends with Miller, in New York, fraternizing with the scholarly Robert Silvers and Susan Sontag. That friendship bit the dust when Booker savaged Monitor in print. Hearing of the pique caused, he could not resist pushing it further. ‘[It just] shows’, he remarks, ‘how malicious and sad I was in those days.’ Revealing that traces of admiration lay behind the lampoon, he concedes that the McLuhan volume was ‘awfully interesting’ and that he meant to write an appreciative footnote about Miller in his own book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories.⁹⁴ He recalls that, when they were friendly:

Jonathan reminded me vaguely of my ancestor, Coleridge. You remember the famous description, in Carlyle’s Life of Sterling, of Coleridge sitting on Highgate Hill as a sage . . . holding forth for five hours and everyone sitting around in amazement.

The column was ‘only really a tease’ and Miller should not have been so touchy. After all, he formerly called for satirists to draw blood.

The cruellest cut was that Doctor Jonathan was caricatured flying into hysterical distempers precisely about being teased, hands waving ‘like some oriental dervish’, mouth venting ‘squeaks, groans and cries of torment . . . as fine a display of “non-verbal communication” as one could hope to find’.⁹⁵ Many of Miller’s colleagues think he should have been above this schoolyard stuff, or positively flattered by the attention. Others still share his strong sense of injustice. Eric Idle argues that it was hypocrisy, not comedy: ‘They just shat on him, abused him for years and made his life miserable. It’s that English . . . [crushing] of intellectuals by people who pretend they haven’t got degrees from Cambridge. And behind it all was the envy of Peter [Cook].’⁹⁶

Miller sounded pretty grim in his Desert Island Discs interview, again around this time, with his chosen luxury being a sharpened razor, ‘either for shaving or suicide’. That so horrified the presenter, Roy Plomley, that he stopped the recording, wanting something more comforting.⁹⁸ Miller headed off to New York as well, revisiting his old haunts for a documentary called West Side Stories, made by the BBC TV producer Tristram Powell. Without the boost of Beyond the Fringe, Manhattan made Miller feel he was sinking fast. An alarming bass line of despair is discernible under his rapid-fire commentary for this programme, talking of how he smelled of failure, felt shrunken and invisible. He saw the city’s decay as an oppressive, ‘larger metaphor of something that’s going on inside oneself’. One old family friend thinks the marriage might have hit a rocky patch, and Rachel says there have been ups and downs over the decades. Miller simply remembers he was extremely low: ‘I broke down in the middle [of West Side Stories]. I just couldn’t do it.’ Powell had to draft in Patti Smith as a second voice, just to complete the assignment. Still, he emphasizes, Miller had a tremendous sense of responsibility, struggling to fulfill the job.⁹⁹

His sense of humour never completely deserted him either, mercifully. Many of his reminiscences in West Side Stories were hilarious and, when he resorted to psychiatry, he ended up entertaining the analyst John Padel. At one session, the shrink took an urgent telephone call, leaped up exclaiming that he was meant to be giving a lecture, and was instantly waved on his way with the quip, ‘Good thing you answered, or they’d have been up shit creek without a Padel.’

Miller was not a complete outcast when he left the NT. Even before he had quit the battlefield in Waterloo, he had found an alternative shelter out towards Blackheath, in south east London. Greenwich Theatre was a smaller venue, while being far from constrictive artistically. Its founding director, Ewan Hooper, happily allowed his new guest to stage a trio of classics. Ibsen’s Ghosts, The Seagull and (again) Hamlet opened in quick succession, then played in repertory.¹⁰⁰ Miller’s leading actors busily switched roles because he was exploring how the first two dramas mapped on to the scenario in Shakespeare’s saga. In all three tragedies, the son (played, in each case, by Peter Eyre) suffers from an absent father and, arguably, harbours an Oedipal attachment to his mother (Irene Worth every time). He therefore resents her new companion (Robert Stephens, repeatedly).

Eyre remembers how the cast had huddled around a gas stove in a freezing rehearsal room, reading and re-reading Ibsen’s script for a fortnight before they even moved. It generated a thrillingly intense atmosphere, even as Miller led his actors gently towards filling out their characters. He would find correspondences between their own personalities and the dramatis personae, so that the performers could be themselves onstage. Eyre is not alone in considering this skill to be Miller’s true gift. ‘It was a very subtle and painless transformation,’ he remarks. ‘When we finally performed the play it was as natural for us as breathing . . . [meaning] a slightly creaking melodrama became a modern and powerful tragedy.’¹⁰³

Hamlet was less impressive. Miller has discussed how varied the interpretations of the Danish prince can be, alluding to Olivier’s ‘rabbit’ and Eyre’s radically different ‘duck’. This was, of course, a reference to the duck-rabbit trompe l’oeil beloved of his former Cambridge tutor Norwood Russell Hanson. Eyre, however, thinks ‘turkey’ might have been more apt in his case. The triple whammy was, doubtless, taking its toll. Sometimes the company worked on Hamlet during the day, performed The Seagull at night, and crammed in a harrowing matinée of Ghosts en route. Stephens and Eyre indulged in a spot of hysterical laughter themselves, renaming the Ibsen after the farcical romp Rookery Nook, because at least it was shorter – the light relief.

The actors were grateful for the Sunday Times’ rave, which said that Hamlet moved with the lightness of a gazelle, especially since most reviewers saw it as a gabbled, confused blur.¹⁰⁴ It was lucky the critics were not in when Stephens went round the bend. He suffered from the same manic psychosis as Lowell, and drank heavily. Miller knew trouble was brewing when the actor started hiding behind doors backstage and leaping out in a Borsalino hat, pretending to be a gangster. Then, in a wildly alternative performance, his Claudius chose to remain offstage and simply yell his first speech from the dressing-room. The whole court, having already assembled in front of the audience, stood frozen with horror. Stephens did eventually wander in, only to start merrily paraphrasing: ‘Well, I’ve written to Norway and told him this sort of thing simply won’t do.’

He enjoyed working at Greenwich Theatre and was made an associate there. He returned for a double bill called Bed Tricks in mid-1975, combining Shakespeare’s problem plays Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. He staged other thwarted NT projects too: The Importance of Being Earnest and the Restoration comedy She Would If She Could.¹⁰⁶ His most creatively playful actors loved the way he kept everything open-ended, even daring them to swap parts midway through runs.¹⁰⁷ Others were unhappy with his extremely improvisational style.

She Would may have been a forgotten gem but, without fixed blocking, Margaret Courtenay could not memorize her lines as lustful old Lady Cockwood. In a decidedly unscheduled move, she walked out just before press night.¹⁰⁸ A stand-in was found. Also Paul Eddington, playing Cockwood’s lugubrious spouse, kept the audiences laughing. Nevertheless, he condemned the director as disastrously irresponsible.¹⁰⁹ As for The Importance of Being Earnest, Miller did not resurrect his scorned cross-dressing idea. Irene Handl was cast as Lady Bracknell, having clearly been forgiven for her bad-mannered pushiness on The Freeway. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember her lines either, until messing around amazingly saved the day. At the final run-through, Miller told everyone to try another accent, just to relax. Handl reverted to her continental roots and, as if by magic, was word-perfect.

The critics’ jaws hit the floor when the dowager’s legendary plummy lines were delivered with Mittel-European vowels, accompanied by Yiddish Momma mannerisms. (‘A hendtbeg?’ was followed by a non-verbal scoff, ‘Phugh!’) They would probably have been less shocked by a drag act. Notwithstanding, Nicholas de Jongh from the Guardian cheered this Lady B. as a breathtaking change from the norm, and Punch’s Sheridan Morley liked the way that Algernon (David Horovitch) sounded less arch than usual, more like a natural wit from some predecessor of the Bloomsbury Set.¹¹⁰

The critics’ ratings certainly veered up and down. Miller’s take on All’s Well was too bitter-tasting and dour for many. It offered oddly compelling moments all the same, with Helena’s absconding fiancé, Bertram, and his reprobate chum, Parolles, played like Just William and Ginger with a nasty edge.¹¹¹ Miller also became intrigued by Helena’s role as an upwardly mobile doctor’s daughter. Beginning to see her as a tuitional heroine, he would go on to discern deep affinities with Viola in Twelfth Night, Cordelia in Lear and Portia in The Merchant of Venice: all women who try to teach foolish men to love better.112 He had now gained an overarching grasp of these plays, which would make him a prime candidate when, in 1980, British television urgently needed someone to take the epic BBC Shakespeare Series in hand.

His Greenwich revival of Measure for Measure, in the meantime, ended the Bed Tricks season on a high. Penelope Wilton’s Isabella was a spinster-nun in the making, defensively clutching a large handbag.¹¹³ Horovitch was her worldly brother. Rather than happily reunited, he and his devout sibling remained unreconciled at the close. This edgy staging was fanfared as surpassing all the director’s previous Shakespeare productions.¹¹⁴ Consternation therefore greeted the news that he was again threatening to quit the theatre, because of the roller-coaster of reviews and because freelance work was so penniless. He could not possibly go now, the Evening Standard cried.¹¹⁵

So, before long, he was staging Chekhov’s Three Sisters in the West End. He took a bit of persuading. Having been invited to direct by Janet Suzman, he had responded with a postcard, saying, ‘I will never, never, never do another production!’ However, he was soon in rehearsals with a superb cast, including Suzman, Susan Engel, Angela Down, Peter Eyre and John Shrapnel.¹¹⁶ They bonded like a family and the pre-West End tour opened a whole week earlier than scheduled, an outstanding example of Miller working fast.¹¹⁷

Suzman recollects that this staging was delightfully un-English, slightly rumbustious:

It was the hot summer of ’76 and we were a bit like those Toulouse Lautrec cancan dancers in our petticoats – with rivulets of perspiration running from behind your ear and down your cleavage – sitting in this unspeakable heat, longing for Moscow. The temperature under the lights rose to 102 degrees. We put a barometer onstage to make sure our suffering was real.

Miller wanted the production to be astringent, for he saw the play as a sharply focused snapshot, a still that reveals details of pain and decay normally escaping notice.¹¹⁸ The lapsed and ageing doctor, Chebutykin, was tragicomical, feeling like a renegade flop. Miller had him – presumably with no razor to hand – drunkenly trying to drown himself in the washbasin, panting hopelessly as he resurfaced, as if to say, ‘Oh God, I can’t even manage that!’¹¹⁹ Forever mourning that he left high-powered science, this director surely also identified with the Prosorov siblings, yearning for their lost idyll of intellectual sophistication – ‘Moscow, Moscow.’ He is, in that sense, profoundly Chekhovian.

The New Statesman declared that Miller’s near-definitive staging should have opened at the National.¹²¹ Moreover, this production earned him an Olivier Award for Best Director, the first one ever given.¹²² This was a pinnacle in his theatre career in terms of industry recognition, and Three Sisters proved that he could shine in the commercial sector (at least in the UK). The bookings were extended to 100 performances and, though risky box-office fare, it broke the record for London’s longest-running Chekhov.

What did he say in his acceptance speech, trophy in hand? He said farewell to the theatre, again. This time it was official, a high-profile adieu with the cameras rolling, broadcast on Nationwide. Or was it just a histrionic gesture, even if sincerely meant? Many in the business and the media had a sneaking feeling this was Jonathan ‘Crying “Wolf”’ Miller at it once more. Goodbye – or was it just au revoir? Very probably.

It was to be a perpetual va et vient. Nevertheless, his intimate relationship with the British theatre did, essentially, come to a halt here, with the exception of one concentrated spurt of renewed activity when he briefly took over the Old Vic. Setting aside the six plays which he directed as the artistic director there in 1988–9, his theatre productions originating in the UK in the quarter-century ensuing from 1976 can be counted on the fingers of one hand, followed by a scattering thereafter.¹²³

The drama critics stood accused, along with Peter Hall and Private Eye, of making him feel so undervalued that he withdrew. Therefore an overview, weighing up their remarks, is called for here. They had said he manhandled texts as carelessly as medical students (supposedly) treated corpses. He butchered them like a demon-surgeon. He anaesthetized comic plays as if solemnly trying to live down his early career as an entertainer. Or else he was too comical, too gimmicky. He was over-cerebral, under-dramatic, better at having theories than at theatre practice.

What should be pointed up is that some of those excoriating comments were expressed by reviewers as a preamble to them reassessing such stances, and even declaring there were ‘two Jonathan Millers’. There was a Miller whom they loved. He was an enticingly experimental director who injected new life into time-worn classics and long-forgotten works. He refreshingly pared away dramatic excesses. Rather than gimmicky or over-cerebral, he would often be sensitive, imaginative and superlatively intelligent.¹²⁴

He has been very affable with certain reviewers. Robert Gore-Langton, for example, remembers an interview when his back pain was cured by the ex-medic who (benignly) told him to hang from a beam. The poet and theatre critic James Fenton has sustained a friendship with him for many years. In the early 1970s, Michael Billington and Irving Wardle had been on amicable terms with him as well, until they found fault in their professional capacity. Billington recounts how he and the director enjoyably discussed theatrical matters on arts programmes such as Kaleidoscope. Then, one day he penned a Guardian opinion piece saying that the relentless criticisms of Hall’s NT regime had to stop. He says:

I shall never forget Jonathan coming into the [recording] studio, unshaven and looking rather grey and shocked. His tone to me that morning was obviously, radically different . . . It was as if I had betrayed him. That’s what I most vividly remember. It was as if he saw me as a sort of friend who had turned into an enemy.

Maybe Miller had a gang mentality regarding arts journalists: they were either with or against him, onside or excommunicate.

Before long he was so galled that he began retaliating. His pique was not quite on a par with John Osborne, who famously sent out hate mail, threatening to duff up and do in critics, all in the name of his fantasy gang, the Playwrights’ Mafia. Still, when a panel gathered for a platform discussion at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Miller chipped in from the audience specifically mortifying Wardle and Billington with the slight: ‘After six months you become like the Wizard of Oz, booming through the public address system of your paper.’¹²⁶ Assuming that his fellow directors would be judicious, he contested that peer review, as in the world of science, would be far better.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer humorously confesses that the mere thought of Miller hospitalized him at one point when he was working, unhappily, at another paper and was sent off to interview the great mind. Unable to face an intellectual harangue, he went doolally, boarded a random train to Dawlish and checked in for a six-week stint of (Miller-free) medical help on arrival. Wardle rolls with the punches, just very reasonably protesting, ‘Jonathan is unfair to say that no critics are thoughtful.’ Miller continues, regardless, to bombard the ‘whinging fraternity’ with retaliatory flak. He writes them off as ignoramuses ‘farting in public’, as ‘worse than leukemia’, and no better than kerb-crawlers looking to be ‘sucked off in an interesting way’.¹²⁹

It is somewhat perverse, perhaps, that the author of this biography is a theatre critic, and that’s not to mention Miller’s own past phase as a book, screen and stage reviewer. One journalist even dared to suggest that, as a director with great exegeses, he was fundamentally a critic.¹³⁰ How he relates to the profession has been mind-bendingly complicated ever since, as a schoolboy, he played the satirist-critic to criticize the critics on the BBC’s Under-Twenty Parade.

In the mid-1970s, whether it was a self-destructive or a reconstructive urge, he stated that he was knowingly burning his boats. He intended to return to neurology, to study serious brain damage. The critics probably just hoped they weren’t going to end up under the knife.