In Two Minds

He declined to link the opera back to the Beaumarchais Figaro, his bugbear at the NT. Mozart’s brilliant creation about the vicissitudes of love was, he preferred to think, ‘an orphan with no parents’, or was more like Chekhov and Shakespeare’s high comedies in its subtle depiction of relationships.² One of his innovations was, nevertheless, inspired by Beaumarchais’ sequel, La Mère Coupable, for Miller had the Countess depicted as a mother. The soprano Valerie Masterson, taking that role, had two infants fleetingly brought to her by a nursemaid. Love-deprived in her marriage, this Countess was acutely melancholy, though cheering up in the company of the page Cherubino (played by Sally Burgess).³

Miller suggested that the amorous youth was a womanizing Don Giovanni in the making, a boy-man with ‘what Freud called polymorphous perversity’. The frock-donning scene, where Cherubino dresses as a woman, was unusually frisky, involving some research into eighteenth-century pornography and whipping with ribbons. Miller had specially requested a Cherubino with a small bottom.⁴ In the garden tryst scene, Burgess also hummed the tune of Mozart’s ‘Champagne’ aria from Don Giovanni: a witty symmetry since Mozart himself slipped a musical quotation from Figaro into Don Giovanni.5

The production was regarded by the Daily Telegraph as decidedly ‘controversial’. Its reviewer took exception to the director cutting out the more ‘traditional horseplay’, not staging individual arias ‘as is the custom’, and having the Countess sit in a chair while singing.⁶ If British theatre critics had slowly become less conservative, some of their opera colleagues still had a long way to go.⁷ Miller sighs about some aficionados in this field having stereotyped ideas. ‘They’re like Konrad Lorenz’s geese,’ he says, ‘who are reared in isolation with only a wastepaper basket dragged around their enclosure, and who woo the wastepaper basket thenceforth. I think opera-goers become imprinted, clinging desperately to the first version of Figaro they’ve seen at an impressionable age.’ He suggests a Platonic analogy, where any new variation is viewed as ‘a failed version’, falling short of the supposed ideal.⁸

For sure, not all critics are so narrow-minded. The Sunday Times applauded the freshness of Masterson’s performance and a second Telegraph reviewer rejoiced at the stock comic business being junked and at the audience being trusted to notice tiny smiles and frowns.⁹ Figaro was a resounding hit in-house as well. Nicholas Hytner (now artistic director of the NT) comments: ‘When I was at the ENO [as an assistant and staff director], that production was a revelation. It was beautiful, wonderfully acted, done in a big theatre with fantastic simplicity.’ It formed part of the repertoire for twelve years, receiving generally warmer and warmer reviews.¹⁰

Lord Harewood, as head of the company, wasted no time. At the first cast party for Figaro, he invited Miller to direct The Turn of the Screw. Based on Henry James’ novella, Benjamin Britten’s chamber piece centres on a Victorian governess, possibly a fantasizing neurotic, who strives to save her young wards from the menacing and perhaps sexually corrupting ghosts of her predecessor (Miss Jessel) and the ex-valet (Quint). It was reported that, mid-way through rehearsing this intense piece, Miller was ‘almost theologically obsessed’ by the ghosts, insisting they had to appear real.¹¹ He had it both ways, though.¹² Some saw his ghouls as excessively palpable. Graham Clark’s threatening Quint strode right up to the little boy, Miles, on an extended stage jutting over the pit – almost into the audience’s laps. Conversely, the opera’s neo-Gothic mansion, with forbidding facades and crenellated towers, was conjured up using phantasmagorical, multi-layered projections. This meant that the characters could glide past each other in a kind of intermediate transit zone that blurred the real and the imagined.¹³

On the question of the governess hallucinating, Miller knew that Henry James had consulted the neurologist Hughlings Jackson and discussed the deathly foreboding silence of the aura phase which precedes epileptic fits. There is a silence, in both the novella and the opera, just before the governess sees the ghosts. ‘I wasn’t claiming she had epilepsy, but there are intimations of a hysterical mental state. There were lots of these neurasthenics,’ he says, referring to nineteenth-century records of hysteria which described thwarted and isolated women who, with no sexual life of their own, became obsessed with elaborate fantasies.14 Jill Gomez, who took over the role of the governess, says that she was so spooked by James’ characters and Britten’s music – let alone Miller’s eerie set – that she woke up screaming in the night.¹⁵

Miller says that he did not regard her ward, Miles, as a wicked, dirty-minded or sexually abused delinquent, but as running messages between Jessel and Quint, like the boy in The Go-Between.¹⁶ ‘Miles has probably’, he remarks, ‘just blundered into the attic and overheard sounds of intercourse, the snapping of suspenders, and been intrigued by these games of bottoms, you know.’ Some reviewers, nonetheless, discerned signs of sexual corruption in the children’s games, and Britten’s partner, Peter Pears, wrote an enraged letter to Harewood declaring that Benjamin would be turning in his grave.¹⁷ It was the startlingly physical struggle over the boy which, Miller believes, touched a raw nerve and caused Pears’ ‘Niagara of petulant, violent, contemptuous disagreement’.¹⁸ Or maybe there was some irritation going right back to Beyond the Fringe. Miller had, after all, played the MC in Moore’s Little Miss Britten skit, a hilariously precious rendition of ‘Little Miss Muffet’.

The production was acclaimed as powerful, ingenious and ‘nightmarishly unnerving’, with its minimalism reflecting the music’s economy of means and its restrained performances conveying darkly twisted psyches. Nicknamed The Return of the Screw, it continued to be revived into the 1990s.¹⁹

Legend has it that Miller arrived at the start of rehearsals for his next ENO project, Richard Strauss’ Viennese confection Arabella, exclaiming, ‘I’ve just heard the music. Not very good is it!’²⁰ Though he had been called in late, at the leading soprano Josephine Barstow’s special request, this is not the only tale of him barely studying the score beforehand.²¹ Ever keen on improvisation, he favours listening and responding on the spot, not swotting up on others’ recordings (even if many of his singers, inevitably, know previous versions).

The real problem, as Nicholas Hytner recollects, was that Arabella’s romantic storyline was unreconstructed hokum and everyone involved eventually realized this.²² The piece was, as a result, not programmed for long.²³ Still, Miller’s staging was reviewed quite amiably. He came to appreciate Strauss’ ability to capture conversational rhythms and intonations in musical phrasing, and he would later direct four more of the composer’s operas.²⁴

His value to the ENO had already been recognized, with Harewood making him an associate director not long after Figaro.²⁵ Having signed up to stage a new opera every year, Miller was scheduled to follow Arabella with Rigoletto, but he obligingly squeezed in another of Verdi’s tragedies, Otello, when the veteran tenor Charles Craig decided he wished to sing at the Coliseum. This show nearly didn’t happen because of industrial action. Only last-minute negotiations ensured the curtain was raised, late, on press night. John Tomlinson raced to the rescue as well when the cast member playing Lodovico fell ill. Already engaged at the Royal Opera House, Tomlinson had to scoot from the show there (where he was handily killed off in Act One) to rematerialize on the Coliseum stage as the Venetian emissary in the second half of Otello.

Performed in Elizabethan costume on a wooden arched set, loosely based on Shakespeare’s Globe, Otello was hailed as one of the venue’s greatest successes, ‘a triumph in almost every way’.26 Finding the production sold out, would-be punters were seen waving banknotes outside the venue in St Martin’s Lane.²⁷ Miller was praised for improving Craig’s acting and adding psychological nuances to the opera’s simplified characters. Horribly plausible, Neil Howlett’s Iago was coldly manipulative, behind his bluff manner, as he seeded jealous thoughts in his newly-married general’s mind.²⁸ Miller, in turn, encouraged Rosalind Plowright to play Desdemona as a vivacious woman defying her father and, when attacked by her husband, putting up a fight. Instead of unliberated saintliness and a limply accepted suffocation, her final scene was ferocious, with legs kicking and sheets flying.

In spite of the plaudits, Miller dismisses this production as utterly unmemorable, saying the music is wonderful but the drama is sentimentalized drivel. Opera directors, he observes, have to spend much of their time performing reconstructive surgery. Moreover, he did not much rate Otello because he had been filming Shakespeare’s far subtler play for the BBC. His Othello was broadcast just ten days after Otello’s opening night.

Miller was making the news not only at the ENO but also as the flying doctor-director brought in to save television’s ailing BBC Shakespeare Series.²⁹ He took charge of this venture in 1980, being entrusted with the top post of executive producer. The series had been introduced two years earlier as the greatest drama project that the Corporation had ever undertaken. A co-production with the American media company Time-Life, it boasted a mammoth £7 million budget, and its mission was to work through the Bard’s entire dramatic oeuvre of 37 plays over six years.³⁰ However, the initial output, with Cedric Messina at the helm, had been unimpressive. An inept Much Ado had been shelved and other dull productions were panned.³¹

In some respects, the new recruit was a risky appointment. Time-Life and their corporate backers had insisted on ‘classic interpretations’ which could be sold as a definitive video collection and, supposedly, never age. The contract therefore stipulated that every play must be done in traditional costume, with no monkey tricks. Even as he donned the executive mantle, Miller openly argued that the master plan was naive, almost any recording would soon look dated, and monkey tricks could be enlivening. ‘I hope’, one executive sniped, ‘he’s not going to do them underwater.’³²

In fact, Miller was ideal for the series, having a strong interest in the Renaissance combined with zing. His popularity in America was also refreshed by the Stateside broadcasting of The Body in Question and by Dick Cavett’s chat-show on which he appeared for an unprecedented five nights in a row.³³

He says that he was, justifiably, fired in the end, because he was floundering and despairing. Hans-Dieter Roser, the theatre’s general secretary at the time, clearly liked him and now sees the funny side, even as he confirms:

Yes, it became a real disaster! Jonathan came to the office and said, ‘How much did the production cost? I want to pay it back and go.’ We talked him into staying but then Brandauer left. He got a doctor to write a note: ‘The right ankle of Brandauer is not suitable for the part of Puck.’ The artistic director read this out at a press conference and the journalists just laughed and laughed, then the doctor called and said he would take us to court . . . Yes, yes, it was terrible!

Apparently Miller was in such a stew that, having invited a friend to come and stay, he returned from the theatre one afternoon and literally sent her packing, saying he could not imagine what she was doing there. The astonishing peripeteia occurred soon after that, when his son William had turned up for a visit. As Miller explains:

We were sitting in a cafe and suddenly I saw these two unmistakably English figures from BBC management, in nylon shirts with their jackets over their arms, making their way across the Ringstrasse. They were waving and calling ‘Hello, Jonno!’ and asking me whether I would take over the series.

He had been seeking a niche on the continent precisely because he had no foothold at the National Theatre or at Trevor Nunn’s RSC, therefore he leaped at this opportunity to return to spoken drama and a cornucopia of Shakespeare in the UK. He knew that dramas written for the Globe’s wooden ‘O’ might not adapt perfectly to the electronic square of a TV screen, but television was Britain’s real national theatre, playing in everyone’s home, countrywide.

Bringing a new buzz to the proceedings, Miller pulled the series out of a nosedive.³⁶ His casting had appeal, a combination of the populist and the adventurous. Bob Hoskins, who had played the gangster in the BBC’s Pennies from Heaven, transmogrified into Iago, opposite Anthony Hopkins’ Othello. John Cleese, from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, was to take his first classical role as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. With Antony and Cleopatra, Miller decided to counter the cliché of glamorous sexiness, having Colin Blakely portray the Roman soldier like a battered, ageing rugby star alongside the unvoluptuous but vivacious Jane Lapotaire, whom the director describes as an ‘interestingly sluttish Cleopatra’. The Egyptian queen was irresistible, he says, ‘not because she sucked Antony off in some spectacular way, but because – unlike the awful twin-set-and-pearls Octavia [his wife] – she was prepared to stay up till four in the morning and go out in disguise to the bazaars’.³⁷

He also caused a stir within the BBC’s Television Centre by shaking up the status quo there. He turned his executive office suite into a humming communal HQ, like a brains trust.³⁸ His technical staff, designers and other bright sparks piled in together. Michael Wood (formerly of the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company) worked on the series’ appended educational programmes, and a small corps of imaginative directors was gathered: crucially Elijah Moshinsky (who had become a fast-rising opera and theatre director after the OCSC), Jane Howell and Jack Gold.³⁹

Looking back, Gold believes that Miller was brave to offer him The Merchant of Venice since he had done no Shakespeare before and very little studio work.⁴⁰ ‘Jonathan let you get on with it,’ he says, ‘so it was wonderful, and kind of frightening.’ Actually, Miller avoided sitting in on others’ rehearsals because he found it hard to keep his lips sealed. As Jane Howell remembers it, he made the whole venture artistically liberating because, while offering support at just the right moment, he was never interfering or daunted.

When he did watch his recruits at work and was pleased, he would bound out from his viewing booth to congratulate everyone. At one point, when Howell did not have enough room to mock up a set for large-scale battle scenes, he stormed into the offices of the managerial big guns to ensure the problem was solved. Howell recalls that he would pick up on the slightest hint of interest which she showed in any topic. A pile of books would magically appear on her desk the next morning.⁴¹ ‘That was tremendous. We were all part of Jonathan’s gang really,’ she says.

For Moshinsky, there was a backstory. Some years before, he had turned up at the NT for a job interview with Peter Hall and, as he explains:

I was sitting around waiting and I saw a file on the table – about me – so I looked in it and there was a note in which Jonathan had spoken against me, saying I had a very peculiar personality. I’m afraid he was right! . . . But his description desperately hurt me. He couldn’t take the competition at that time, when he was being crushed by Peter Hall, and he can’t control it . . . Jonathan has always had a problem with jealousy. It’s a small problem but it’s a major part of his personality. I learned at an early stage never to compete with him . . . The thing is, though, that Peter Hall never said a cross word against me and I can’t bear him, whereas I admire Jonathan greatly. He is up and down, but he’s the real thing.

Miller proved a generous boss on the Shakespeare series, offering All’s Well to this Young Turk with no TV experience and alleviating his fears.⁴⁴ As Moshinsky explains: ‘Jonathan said, “Just follow me”, so I got a kind of apprenticeship on Antony and Cleopatra. Everyone helped everyone else.’ He goes on to praise how innovative the productions were with Shakespeare’s verse, making the metre sound conversational for the small screen. That was in direct opposition to the RSC ‘where’, he says, ‘it was all leather and opera, people speaking in a meaningless singsong way’. Miller’s ENO Otello and near-simultaneous BBC Othello were especially fascinating because the TV play was deliberately anti-operatic and sotto voce. Penelope Wilton’s Desdemona barely even sang ‘The Willow Song’ under her breath, being too dazed with grief for anything more.⁴⁵

Moshinsky and his executive producer were united in their desire to explore the small screen as a picture frame. They introduced numerous allusions to period paintings, with chiaroscuro lighting effects and with rich palettes of reds and golds – or, in the tragedies, bleaker greys and blacks.⁴⁶ By this point in his career, Miller believed a director should be like the head of an art history faculty, educating his designers and introducing a wealth of visual references. In The Taming of the Shrew, the family home was a Vermeer-style interior with a servant serenely cleaning the tiled floor, unfazed by the sound of Kate scuffling furiously in the room beyond.⁴⁷ In Antony and Cleopatra, he drew on Veronese’s depiction of classical heroes and heroines who sported half-Roman and half-Renaissance garb. Artists of Veronese’s era, he suggested, had stereoscopic vision in that sense.

Rule-teasing modern allusions also sneaked under the radar, together with a drag act. The Greek army’s costumes in Troilus were based on Cranach, yet they evoked M.A.S.H. with shades of khaki. The subversive character Thersites was specifically played like the cross-dresser Corporal Klinger, in a period frock.48 Courtesy of Miller’s designer, Colin Lowrey (formerly of The Body in Question), Ajax had Cranach’s Eve as a pin-up by his camp-bed, and in the generals’ tent were flip-chart sketches of a horse (glanced at, with bemusement, by the Trojan emissary). A touch of more personally informed satire kicked off Timon.⁴⁹ In the opening scene, John Bird and John Fortune played the socialite aesthetes at the Athenian equivalent of a chatterati party, impersonating Huw Weldon and Isaiah Berlin.⁵⁰

Miller took a strictly historical line on The Taming of the Shrew regarding Kate’s final speech, in praise of female obedience. It would originally have been delivered without any rebellious twist, he said. That reading raised a few feminist hackles, and eyebrows may, indeed, have been arched in Gloucester Crescent at the notion of an authoritative pater familias. Nevertheless, Michael Walzer’s social history book The Revolution of the Saints backed up Miller’s idea that Petruchio – rather than an unacceptable bully – was a Tudor Puritan squire who would have believed, in line with his times, that the male head of the household must be obeyed.⁵¹

John Cleese points out that a secondary, psychoanalytical reading lay behind the production. As played by Sarah Badel, Kate’s anxiety-driven tantrums were aggravated by her family’s panicky responses, and by her sibling being favoured. She was soothed by the unflappable manner of Cleese’s Petruchio.⁵² Besides being a mature suitor, he captured the slightly aloof yet gentle demeanor of a consultant child psychiatrist, subtly making their relationship a game. Though he was in doublet and hose, you could almost see a medic’s white coat, or vestiges of the Tavistock Clinic through the veneer of Vermeer. Later, his Petruchio moved on to different role-play, acting barmy so Kate could see the effects of her delinquent behaviour as in a looking-glass.

Tempered thus, The Shrew did not cause a huge furore. It was, in general, warmly received.⁵³ However, being executive producer on this series certainly was not a breeze for Miller. The rule about using traditional costumes was unacceptable to many of the world-class directors whom he wanted on board, including Ingmar Bergman and Peter Brook. In a brief fracas, Michael Bogdanov threatened court action after being sacked for not abiding by the brief. ‘I engaged him’, Miller recalls, ‘to do Timon of Athens, then the costume designer rang up and said, “I’m up to my arse in kimonos. He’s doing it all Japanese!”’ Bogdanov now accepts that it was not the cleverest episode in his life. At the time, he testily called the BBC project the greatest disservice to Shakespeare in years.⁵⁴

Another row blew up regarding Othello. This had started during Cedric Messina’s tenure. The UK actors’ union, Equity, was so annoyed by the American star James Earl Jones (aka the voice of Darth Vader) being cast in the title role that the whole production had been put on ice. Miller did not entirely calm the waters by replacing him with Anthony Hopkins, the UK’s last major blacked-up Othello.⁵⁸ He says this got him into terrible trouble and was embarrassing:

Of course, it was put down as racist on my part and you certainly wouldn’t do it with a white actor now, or need to . . . But it was on the edge of that moment of political correctness, and I didn’t think that James Earl Jones was right, not because he was black but because I didn’t want an American in the middle of a British cast . . . I have some misgivings about it, but at the time I wanted the best actor and I wasn’t interested in whether he was black.

The Brixton, Toxteth and other riots of 1981, sparked by perceived white racism, broke out between the filming and the transmission of Othello, which must have made it more prickly. Miller’s opinion is, still, that skin colour is not the play’s main issue. In his view, Othello is an assimilated foreigner who is not expecting Iago’s hate campaign, having largely forgotten his racial difference. ‘Moor’ denotes someone of Arab or Berber descent, and Hopkins’ Othello (like Charles Craig’s Otello at the ENO) was only slightly darker skinned than his ensign.⁵⁹ For a model, Miller had King Hussein of Jordan in mind, a Hashemite warrior drilled in Sandhurst manners.

According to Hopkins, the directorial reading was that Othello had long been susceptible to jealousy because he was emotionally insecure, his mother having been taken from him at an early age.⁶⁰ Miller regarded Iago’s envy as the truly crucial driving force in the play, and strikingly suggested that the ensign’s mother might have failed at breastfeeding. According to Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theories, that would have led to pessimistic dissatisfaction and envious destructiveness in later life.61 Like Edmund in King Lear, Iago was portrayed as an interstitial mischief-maker too, disgruntled at not being fully welcomed into the elite ranks. Bob Hoskins played him like a cockney sergeant-cum-psychotic Rumpelstiltskin, seemingly the salt of the earth, covertly a wicked practical joker.

That said, it was Hopkins (not Hoskins) who put a spanner in the works, during rehearsals and on set. As Miller recollects, one run-through was being performed in modern army kit, just for fun, with an audience of school kids. It was going perfectly well until the tragic hero suddenly walked off in a huff. Then the last two days of filming were abominable, he says:

When we came to the murder of Desdemona, he [Hopkins] obviously got pretty anxious about it. I began giving him some notes, then he stormed off saying, ‘It’s all directing, directing, directing.’ He sulked in a corner and refused to come back . . . almost jeopardiz[ing] the production. Many years later, he wrote a letter apologising to me, but I still don’t understand what went wrong, or whether he really understood the bloody-mindedness. I think he would withdraw from things I suggested out of cowardice and panic.

He did not reply to Hopkins’ letter but acknowledges that the actor was, in spite of everything, brilliant.

More large egos had been at loggerheads in Troilus and Cressida, especially in the Greek army camp where Kenneth Haigh, as the testy Achilles, appeared to be in character round the clock. He moaned about crushed toes whenever a tight group shot was required, and he wanted to throttle the squawking chickens which Miller had caged outside the mess tent.⁶²

Struggles aside, many actors had a great time on the series. John Shrapnel may have met a gruesome end as Hector in Troilus – jammed face-down in a puddle, spattered with lumps of fake cerebral cortex – yet he would race to rehearsals every day buoyed up by Miller’s sense of adventure. John Cleese came away from The Shrew with a new-found admiration for Shakespeare, and he still wishes he could have worked with Miller again. He observes:

The sense of confidence, working with him, was extraordinary. There is someone in charge who knows what they want but, at the same time, creates an atmosphere where you can try anything . . . I think he liked operating from the parental position. Actors feel he’s a good father, he’ll look after them. I don’t think he’s after equal relationships but, in that parental situation, he’s about as good as you get.⁶³

The public reaction to the Bardathon, undeniably, kept veering up and down during Miller’s tenure. Complainants called the productions either too conservative or too disrespectful, either reductive or excessively sumptuous – looking like a National Gallery calendar. Some said that his new Lear, again starring Hordern and Middlemass, was little more than a repeat of his BBC Play of the Month version, though for Hordern it was definitley the best.⁶⁵ Several other splenetic attacks were launched from academic institutions in America. H. R. Coursen, who co-edited the book Shakespeare on Television, decried Antony and Cleopatra as an unmitigated disaster and steamed with indignation about Miller’s patronizing insistence on introductory programmes (though WNET had asked him to do those).⁶⁶

The director himself says, with a shrug, that his productions were largely dismissed and only Moshinsky was lauded. However, alongside the applause for The Shrew, the New York Times praised Timon for its uniformly splendid cast (with Jonathan Pryce in the title role), and the Los Angeles Times found Lear utterly compelling. Countering H. R. Coursen, the Washington Post deemed Antony and Cleopatra gorgeous, and Michael Ratcliffe of The (London) Times hailed it as a triumph of unaffected verse-speaking and vibrancy.⁶⁷ Surveying Miller’s contribution, Ratcliffe saw the enterprise setting new standards and displaying a rare jubilant faith in TV.⁶⁸ Retrospectively, the series has been described as a defining moment in British television, with one of the greatest companies of actors ever assembled. The DVD box set was finally released in 2005.⁶⁹

At the time, the chief cameraman took home a BAFTA, and Miller won the Royal Television Society’s silver medal for 1981.⁷⁰ In the following few years, various institutions jostled to recognize his achievements. The National Film Theatre held a retrospective dedicated to his screen work. He was made a fellow of UCL and an honorary fellow of St John’s, Cambridge, and he was awarded a CBE by the Queen in 1983.⁷¹ Bogdanov still claims that the BBC project was a terrible flop and that the shelves of TV companies worldwide remain stacked with the tapes, pre-bought, not broadcast. Yet by 1983 it had been seen by millions of viewers across 37 countries, from China and Iraq to Poland and Peru.⁷²

Even as Lear, Miller’s final contribution to the series, was being broadcast throughout the UK, he was back in the West End with two productions.⁷³ His new staging of Hamlet opened at the Warehouse Theatre, today known as the Donmar. He had so relished working with John Shrapnel and Anton Lesser (his Troilus) at the BBC that he recast them as King Claudius and the Prince of Denmark.⁷⁴ Miller’s close-up TV and his cockpit-style theatre almost seemed to merge in this pocket-sized production in Elizabethan dress.

Troilus had been a challenging role, though a thrilling one. Lesser had found himself awed and intimidated by the director’s flood of eloquent ideas, sometimes wondering if the cast would ever get up on their feet and just do it. He began to fear that he could not act anymore and, he says, ‘Jonathan would be hugely entertaining [acting bits himself], but then I’d try to replicate . . . erroneously thinking that was what he wanted.’ Lesser got through Troilus on sheer adrenalin and Miller instantly offered him Edgar in the BBC Lear. ‘By that time, I felt more confident,’ the performer states, ‘and I had got the measure of him. I was going through this process of learning to listen but not necessarily replicate . . . By Hamlet, I felt I’d really found the way to do justice to his brilliance and enjoy the relationship creatively.’

Kathryn Pogson’s Ophelia was a second problem child, regressing into infantile madness, playing with dolls rather than with flowers. Her insanity was distressingly unprettified, pushing further than Miller’s previous stagings. Based on clinical cases which he delineated to Pogson and on a schizophrenic girl she saw on a train, this Ophelia drooled, scratched at her lips, retched with her fingers down her throat and gradually faded out, becoming emotionally absent to the point of catatonia. ‘It stunned the audience,’ Shrapnel says, ‘and it was quite terrifying to behold, almost unwatchable.’

Comic relief came in Hamlet’s advice to the players on holding the mirror up to nature. Lesser delivered this like a know-it-all undergraduate hanging around at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, precociously lecturing a visiting company while they slapped on the greasepaint and exchanged glances. A real-life graduate, from Swaziland, was loitering at the Warehouse rehearsals, incidentally. Having gained permission to sit in and watch, he appeared to be living out of a suitcase and wishing he was in the show. That student was Richard E. Grant, later to star as the grungy thespian and Hamlet manqué in Withnail and I.

Miller’s Rigoletto opened at the ENO on the very same night that Hamlet transferred, as a hit, from the Warehouse to the Piccadilly Theatre. The omens for the opera were bad. On hearing of Miller’s concept, several critics had blanched and declared he was reverting to shocking monkey tricks if he was going to drag Verdi’s classic out of its sixteenth-century setting, at the ducal court of Mantua, into the Mafia underworld of 1950s New York.⁷⁷ Conservative aficionados started cancelling their tickets in droves.

Miller was not a lone groundbreaker and, by the mid-1980s, he would be seen as part of a growing international breed of revisionist opera directors along with Peter Brook, Patrice Chéreau, Andrei Serban and Peter Sellars.78 Nevertheless, he has been dubbed the inventor of the time-shift opera and, certainly, members of the ENO chorus were obstreperously sceptical at first, having never seen a canonical work given such unorthodox treatment.⁷⁹ Miller and Mark Elder, who was conducting, had certain disagreements about James Fenton’s libretto translation, with Elder resisting American idioms in case they were seen as merely guying the piece.⁸⁰ Elder readily admits:

I got tense because I was very young and conscious of my responsibilities as [the Coliseum’s] music director, and Jonathan directs with the loosest rein of anybody I’ve ever worked with . . . The rehearsals [with the principals] often degenerated into tears of laughter as if we were doing the Christmas pantomime, not one of the greatest tragedies in the repertoire! But that is Jonathan’s way, engendering a relaxed atmosphere . . . Also, everything changed with the chorus the first time they put on their costumes, those 1950’s suits, with Brilliantine in their hair. They all looked in the mirror and recognized themselves – ‘Hey, Charlie, you looked like that when you got married!’ – and they all started to play the game.

Some took such a shine to their mobster outfits that the wardrobe department had to padlock its doors.⁸¹

On opening night, the company was excited and petrified, dreading that the audience would be too conventional and the fur would fly. ‘Well,’ says Elder, ‘if anything deserves the phrase “The rest is history”, that does! At the end of the first scene, the applause was huge and I remember thinking, “Goodness, perhaps we’ve done it! Perhaps it’s going to be all right!”’ The performance was punctuated, thereafter, with cheers and gasps of delighted surprise. The almighty gamble had paid off and it was soon global news, with Time magazine calling the production the talk of London.⁸² It drew new crowds, including many who usually went to musicals, so Miller was now categorically playing a vital role in popularizing live opera – the ‘pop op’ revolution.⁸³

He points out it was his wife who had started the ball rolling by reminding him of Some Like It Hot. In that movie, when the chief gangster needs a St Valentine’s Day Massacre alibi, he claims to have been at Rigoletto, and his cronies meet under the guise of a Friends of Italian Opera convention. When Miller began to map Verdi’s scenario on to the Mafia world, he found an extraordinary correspondence, ‘like two hands, right and left’. The Duke simply became a gangland leader or capo, keeping his title as an underworld nickname and having the same power of life or death over those who irked him. His court became a Cosa Nostra-owned hotel, and Rigoletto, the court jester who pushes his luck, morphed into its barman.

That same summer, the Greater London Council threatened to withdraw the ENO’s grant when Miller objected to the black singer Willard White joining a second cast, which was being assembled to keep Rigoletto in rep at the Coliseum.⁸⁷ Rather than accept White as colour-blind casting, the director said it contradicted his otherwise accurate social realism, because the Italian-American underworld would have been too racist to incorporate black people in the Fifties.⁸⁸ He was completely happy to cast the black soprano Dana Hanchard in the title role of another opera some years later, and White would eventually work with him on another production.⁸⁹

Rigoletto continued to pull crowds for well over quarter of a century, in spite of the management flagging up several revivals as ‘Positively the Last’. It was broadcast on television in the UK and internationally. It came out on video in the 1980s and, in 2003, featured in the reality TV talent show Operatunity. In 2014, one critic called it, ‘as close to cult status as opera gets,’ even as the ENO replaced it with Christopher Alden’s alternative staging.⁹⁰

Might he mean it this time? Was he, the media asked, quitting permanently now? For sure, he said. His guilty conscience was pricking him and, if he was to make a solid contribution in the field of neurology, it was now or never. Stage creations were simultaneously hard work and mere shimmering bubbles, melting into thin air. He had ticked off everything that he wanted to do as a director, and completing a trio of Lears and a trio of Hamlets had brought that home. Suffering a burn-out from years of hectic work was, perhaps, inevitable as well. He was approaching 50 years of age.

Furthermore, the future looked bleak for the subsidized arts. Miller would have loved a cockpit theatre of his own, but the chance of gaining state funding for that seemed slim. Even within the first year of Margaret Thatcher’s regime, the Arts Council’s budget had been cut by around eight per cent, and the number of RFOs (Regularly Funded Organizations) was being drastically reduced. Unsure if his disaffection was predominantly personal or political, he ruminated:

Whatever is making me change my life is a mixture of disappointment, exhaustion and something which I can’t quite put my finger on which makes me wish to be elsewhere. I have a growing inner feeling I am no longer at home.⁹²

He was not eager to tour England’s regional towns anymore, to create his notion of a Congregationalist national theatre, nor was he keen to become an operatic globetrotter. ‘I just feel I’ve come to the end of it . . . like one of those bomber pilots. I’ve been out over the target too often now,’ he said. ‘Roger, so to speak, and out.’⁹³

Before he went, he had to tie up several loose ends in terms of stage and screen. For his last fling with TV directing, he filmed a BBC version of John Gay’s satirical Beggar’s Opera. This yoked Roger Daltrey, from The Who and the rock opera Tommy, together with the classical conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Relieved to find that Miller wanted a gritty rendition, Daltrey sang Gay’s musical interludes – ballads from the eighteenth-century’s Top Ten – in a rough-and-ready manner. As the womanizing highwayman Macheath, he was like an East End gangster in Hogarthian garb, sexually hands-on and ferociously self-centred.

He then gave a valedictory and foreboding address on the subject of TV to key players in the business. In his MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, he described the small screen as an endoscope which lets people peruse otherwise inaccessible worlds, but he expressed grave concerns about the imminent growth of a multi-channel industry with a potentially ‘insatiable appetite and chronic incontinence’.⁹⁶ At this point, in 1983, Britain’s fourth TV service, Channel 4, was less than a year old and was winning praise for its high-calibre arts programmes, being a commercial station with a public service remit. Miller’s own opera productions had featured.⁹⁷ The government, though, was about to change the law on cable transmissions, making numerous commercial channels viable.⁹⁸ Anticipating a slew of trashy TV stations, Miller’s speech was prescient.

For his adieu to staging opera outside the ENO, he directed Mozart’s Magic Flute as a UK-touring production for Scottish Opera. Rather than a fairytale pantomime, his setting was an Age of Reason library where the young hero, Tamino, fell asleep over his books and began dreaming.⁹⁹ Miller saw this piece, from 1791, as an Enlightenment fantasy, with the Queen of the Night and Sarastro respectively representing the era’s opposed camps – Jesuitical Catholics and progressive, rationalist freemasons (with whom Mozart had connections).¹⁰⁰ Several critics wrote off his notion as over-intellectualized, though this Flute went from strength to strength in subsequent revivals.¹⁰¹

Finally, he signed off in terms of stage plays with a reprise of his seedy and, again, Hogarthian School for Scandal. That was in the States, reuniting the director with Robert Brustein, who had moved from Yale to run Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre. The cast, though featuring the future Broadway star Cherry Jones, won only patchy applause.¹⁰²

He had been beginning to get back up to speed over the previous few years. The Body in Question made him realize how much he missed medicine, and from that he had gone on to present States of Mind.¹⁰⁴ This was an astoundingly high-powered BBC chat-show: a fifteen-part series of tête-à-têtes where the workings of the brain and the mind were discussed by psychiatrists, psychologists and neuropsychologists, by behavioural and social scientists, philosophers and scientifically-inclined art historians. The assembled company included Rom Harré, Hanna Segal and Ernst Gombrich, Harvard’s Jerome Bruner and Daniel Dennett, as well as Miller’s former UCL and Cambridge mentors Stuart Hampshire, Richard Gregory and Robert Hinde.

Making these programmes and having in-depth, six-hour conversations before the cameras rolled, Miller felt thrilled to be grappling once more with what mattered to him. It was as if he were thawing out after years of being frozen. ‘You can feel the blood racing through the fingers that have been numbed,’ he enthused. ‘They suddenly feel nimble and sensitive again . . . coming back to life.’¹⁰⁵ He was keen to examine the background to, and developments in psychology’s cognitive revolution. Ranging from Locke and Descartes to artificial intelligence, he and his interviewees elaborated on a central idea: namely, that the brain attempts to match its own conjectural models with the sensory information it is receiving from the outside world. That is to say, in trying to categorize, we actively interpret what we see (or think we see).

Gregory, in particular, expanded on how the mind can flip between different possible readings of the world, the idea which Miller’s old tutor Norwood Russell Hanson had inculcated back at Cambridge. This capacity to flip was illustrated using several of Hanson and Miller’s favourite trompe l’oeils: along with the Necker Cube, the Rubin Vase (where the pot’s outline suddenly looks like two faces pointing inwards).

In a somewhat different vein, Hanna Segal alluded to Miller’s childhood psychiatrist, D. W. Winnicott. She was discussing Kleinian theories, sexual symbols (such as trains supposedly representing parental intercourse), and infants’ ambivalent feelings towards their mothers (centring on breastfeeding). The presenter politely declined to swallow whole her suggestion that an adult’s curiosity about the world necessarily springs from early Oedipal cravings.

Anthony Clare of In the Psychiatrist’s Chair wrote a hostile review of States of Mind for the magazine New Society. Questioning who watched these talking heads on a Sunday afternoon, he scorned Segal and judged the accompanying book of edited dialogues to be a slog.¹⁰⁶ Other ambivalent peer reviews, including Stuart Sutherland’s in the TLS, wished that Miller had taken issue with his interlocutors more often, and had not subjectively omitted core academic psychologists in favour of those with heterogeneous fringe interests. Still, most acknowledged the series to be interesting and winningly convivial in manner.107 As a participant, Gregory had been especially delighted to encounter a knowledgeable TV personality.¹⁰⁸ ‘Jonathan’s neurological programmes are extremely good and I rate him incredibly highly as an expositor,’ he says. The States of Mind book went on to be used as a standard text in American universities, so it clearly was not over everyone’s head.

Rather than becoming part of the UK’s academic brain drain, Miller returned to England after his McMaster semester and began a three-year research fellowship in the University of Sussex’s cognitive sciences department. This was with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust of over £88,000. He underlines that he never made huge amounts of money from his hit operas, being paid only an initial fee and then royalties in the case of international transfers.

Joining the team at Sussex’s experimental psychology lab, he pursued connected clinical work, studying local hospital patients with brain damage and consequent disorders. He wanted to investigate questions relating to memory, perception and processes of knowing. These subjects, close to philosophy, had been considered illicit when he was a trainee.¹⁰⁹

His research did not turn out well. As with his University College fellowship, he did not last the course and he blames himself:

It was my last fling at trying to escape [from directing], but I just didn’t have the stamina to go through with it. Maybe I’d lost the verve. I’d lost the plot because I’d been rotted by showbiz . . . Even the journey [back and forth to Brighton] just wore me out . . . It was very bad and sad.

Some years later he was able to comment jokily that a cross-disciplinary post, holding ‘the Askance Chair’, would have been nice, or just a La-Z-boy recliner might have been apt in his case.¹¹⁰ At the time, he was dog-tired and sorely disappointed in himself, finding he was unfit for the marathon of catching up with modern medicine.

He also reproaches some Sussex colleagues. As at UC, he craved more encouragement. Although willing to function as a junior assistant, he could not find an individual prepared to act as his superior. There was insufficient money to conduct the desired experiments, and more clinical work was required. He did conduct tests relating to perception. These were inspired by the Swedish psycho-physicist Gunnar Johansson who discovered that people, when shown footage of points of light moving in the dark, swiftly distinguish between random shifting dots and human beings in motion (with lights attached to their joints).¹¹¹ Miller’s experiments were preliminary, though, and by no means publishable. He spent weeks struggling to get to grips with computers and the fiendish mathematics involved in modern psychophysics.¹¹²

He and Parkin co-wrote one article for the specialist journal Cortex, concisely entitled ‘Multiple Neuropsychological Deficits Due to Anoxic Encephalopathy: a Case Study’.¹¹⁴ After a dry statistical start, this paper becomes unexpectedly fascinating and tragicomic. It recounts how one patient – a Mrs T, brain-damaged after a cardiac arrest – could no longer fully control her lower limbs or eye movements, was disoriented and severely amnesiac. The article specifically reports that she often bore an expression of glum vacancy yet could become distressed like a child. She would greet her husband very emotionally before turning to stare again at the TV. Miller’s personal style comes through there, in the attention drawn to Mrs T’s retained sense of humour and in several descriptions of touchingly idiosyncratic, painfully funny test results. On one occasion, the patient identified Princess Diana, photographed in a white and yellow hat, as a poached egg. On another, she saw only one of the two examiners in front of her and was visibly startled when the other said, ‘What about me?’ – as if he had sprung out of nowhere.

Miller remembers Mrs T with warm affection and he concludes that, in the long run, his treks up and down the Brighton line were worthwhile as he learned a great deal from Stuart Sutherland, a leading cognitive psychologist and engaging colleague. His scientific stint, moreover, led him to present Ivan and Prisoner of Consciousness, two outstanding medical documentaries, produced by Patrick Uden of The Body in Question, this time for BBC TV’s Horizon and for Channel 4’s Equinox series.¹¹⁵

Ivan Vaughan, a Cambridge lecturer who had developed Parkinson’s disease, suggested that Miller should pay him a home visit. The resultant film showed Vaughan brushing his teeth with terrible shakes, struggling to play billiards, and being able to start but not stop jogging. It was an unforgettably intimate study of determination and frustration, with the doctor being fascinated and gently humorous, learning about the condition rather than cosseting or offering miracle cures. Reviewing Ivan in the Observer, Julian Barnes thought it one of the most original and compelling medical documentaries ever shown.¹¹⁶

Prisoner of Consciousness then dealt with the agonies of Clive Wearing, a musician with a devastated short-term memory. Wearing remained a fluent pianist yet was amazed every time he discovered that he could play, having forgotten the fact and forgetting it over and over again. His love for his wife persisted but he was harrowingly incapable of understanding that she, when absent, was not dead or lost for ever. The Times’ reviewer called this a superlatively intelligent, bizarre and disturbing medi-doc. He lauded Miller for expanding a case history, via conversations with Wearing’s wife, into a philosophical discussion about consciousness and a person’s essential character.117 Oliver Sacks still rates the programme as superb. It shared some ground with his own book The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, which came out the year before, and the overlap of interests was to carry on with Sacks visiting Wearing two decades later, writing about him in his 2007 book Musicophilia.¹¹⁸ ‘I wish Jonathan would make more programmes like that,’ Sacks muses, and Miller himself says that he would like to be remembered long-term for those films.

In spite of his difficulties at Sussex, he worked Gunnar Johansson’s experiments with lights into Moving Pictures, another Miller–Uden documentary for Equinox. This combined the presenter’s childhood passion for cinema and for stereoscopes with neurology, contemplating the nitty-gritty of film editing and how the eye and brain register movement.¹¹⁹

He may well curse the fact that he abandoned Sussex with only one Cortex article to his name but, in the early 1980s, he wrote three immensely popular science books for the layman, or for what would now, hideously, be termed the kidult and edutainment market. Darwin for Beginners, with cartoon illustrations by Boris Van Loon, is still in print today around the globe, recently rebranded as ‘a graphic guide’.¹²⁰ In the New York Review of Books, the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin called it a superbly informative introduction, scientifically impeccable.¹²¹ Then there were the pop-up books The Human Body and The Facts of Life. In these Miller’s mini biology lessons appeared alongside fabulously intricate origami designs by David Pelham, all suitable for family viewing even if some wags had hoped for a pop-up penis.

Miles Kington thoroughly enjoyed himself in The Times, devoting his column to a satire conflating The Human Body and Peter Hall’s Diaries, which came out simultaneously:

Jonathan Miller’s Diaries.

‘Jan 19. I have been asked to produce another 49 operas for television. God, how I hate television. I will just do these 49 operas and then go back to life as an ordinary GP, with just one hand-held camera and a sound recordist. Who knows – perhaps one day Peter Hall will come in complaining of a runny nose.

‘Jan 20. Why have we got a nose? I mean, why not two noses? To sniff in stereo would be to give us directional location of the thing we were sniffing. On the other hand, a double nose would be very difficult to do in a pop-up book.

‘Jan 21. My hands have received a very lucrative TV offer. They have been asked to demonstrate the history of theatre today. On the other hand, the rest of me will not be involved at all. God, how I hate television. Recorded three operas this morning. Must try to do better tomorrow.’¹²²

A few years later, both the Miller–Pelham collaborations were being seen as artworks, displayed in a New York exhibition of books with moving parts and picked out by the New York Times as the most spectacular items on show.¹²⁶ Though they were not going to win any Nobel Prizes, they were very popular in doctors’ waiting-rooms and were used, in America, to explain diagnoses to patients. Ultimately, nearly one and a half million of these pop-ups were sold worldwide, though Miller says he again failed to make a fortune because of the deal cut with the publishers.

A third book, on the brain, did not materialize, and a playful medical software program called Body Works, on which Miller collaborated, was a flop. The CD-ROM market had not taken off at that point and he did not help, blithely belittling computers in what was meant to be a promotional interview – causing his agent to look bug-eyed.¹²⁷ He remains, to this day, rather hilariously incompetent regarding electronic gadgets. According to his children, he once accidentally junked a whole bunch of work on his PC because he did not know how to save files, and he has often called them to ask how his video recorder works.

Off the back of Darwin for Beginners, he planned to write a major TV series on evolution. This fell through, possibly because a rival science presenter, James Burke, was then in the ascendant. Miller had to make do with being the link man for Origins, a one-off programme telling the story of the Earth and homo sapiens through documentary video snippets. The press coverage focused humorously on him as a super-sophisticated specimen, shaped like a gangly question mark to epitomize mankind’s intellectual quest.¹²⁸ Compared to The Body in Question, however, this was science programming on the slide, padded out with second-hand scraps.

In the second half of the Eighties, when proposing other scientific series, he was to be frustrated by unreceptive management strata.¹²⁹ He spoke out about the BBC succumbing to a lowbrow, ratings-based agenda, linking that to Thatcher’s market-led philistinism. It was to little avail.¹³⁰ Dumbing down had begun.

Miller longed, too, for the knockabout affection of the rehearsal room, the designer’s charmingly untidy workshops, and, as he put it, ‘all that intense activity dedicated to the realisation of a beautiful object’.¹³³ In truth, no one had fully suspended their disbelief in 1983. He was called the retiree in question and, with hindsight, he agrees that he was a fool to have proclaimed that he was quitting.

Soon he was rubbing shoulders once more with those in the performing arts, because he was named as the new chairman of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1984. Holding this post (which did not entail any hard work) for the next decade, he served as a jovial figurehead. His most vivid memory is of a none-too-aesthetic, but hilariously anti-hierarchical incident at one of the festival’s annual cavalcades. He was waving to the crowds from an open-top vintage car, as in a royal progress, only to be hailed at a pelican crossing by a raggedy drunk. The latter, leaning into the vehicle for a wee chat, noted the occupant’s eye dropping to his urine-soaked trousers and quipped, quick as a flash, ‘Oh ay, I’ve bin havin’ some problems wi’ ya toilet facilities.’

In 1985 Miller was back directing, with his Don Giovanni opening at the English National Opera.¹³⁴ If it was ironic that his not-so-final West End play had been Hamlet – the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind – then the same went for this Mozart. The tale of a playboy who failed to renounce frivolity marked Miller’s return to his so-called mistress, showbiz. His vision was a gloomy one, evoking the eighteenth-century Gothic murk of Goya and Fuseli’s nightmares. William Shimmell, playing the eponymous philanderer, was pursued by Lesley Garrett, Felicity Lott and Josephine Barstow around a looming brick tower which split and revolved to create multiple locations: a piece of architecture as changeful as the man himself.¹³⁵

One surprise for traditionalists was the Commendatore’s arrival at supper. The statue of the late patriarch, coming to life to chastise Giovanni, was far less marmoreally stiff than usual, sitting down at the table without any supernatural effort.¹³⁶ The finale did not entail Giovanni falling through a trapdoor into hellfire either. Inspired by the historian Richard Cobb’s writings on dishonoured ladies who were found drowned in the Seine, this staging had the Don climactically dragged off by the spectres of bedraggled women he had driven to abortions and suicide – his psychological demons. Some even brandished their gory foetuses and slit wrists. ‘I thought, “What is hell?”’ says Miller. ‘“Hell is the harm we have done by our actions . . . come back to haunt us”.’¹³⁷

In fact, he pictured this Lothario as a bored aristocrat doomed from the start, relentlessly doing the rounds in his personal hell of compulsive seducing, weary but never satisfied.¹³⁸ Thus the ‘Catalogue’ aria enumerating Giovanni’s conquests – normally played as a lengthy laugh – grew arid and desperate. Miller saw him as almost vampiric, and as less interested in possessing females than in dispossessing male competitors.

Opera houses in Italy, America, Finland and New Zealand imported Miller’s Giovanni, and his assistant Karen Stone (later head of Graz Opera) felt that he thoroughly understood the tragicomic mix. ‘That’s why his production’, she says, ‘could grow over the years, get a good patina and be hugely successful . . . For the last ENO revival, people were queuing outside.’¹⁴¹

Miller’s next production at the Coliseum, his Grand Hotel Mikado, was a huge immediate hit, starring Eric Idle as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner.¹⁴² Harewood’s successor, Peter Jonas, had been wondering how the company could survive the ongoing diminution of government funding, and on the day he met Miller for a brainstorming session he returned to work beaming.¹⁴³ Miller instantly developed the joyous idea of taking Gilbert and Sullivan’s well-known operetta and tossing out all the old Japanese nonsense. He would wittily anglicize the piece or, to be more precise, bring out its true nationality.¹⁴⁴

Though he had always associated G&S with fusty revues and ossified D’Oyly Carte productions, he grasped – as had G. K. Chesterton – that the jokes were all about English life. The cod-Asian names were from Nanny’s potty-training and nursery talk: Nanki-Poo, Peep-Boo and Yum-Yum. Moreover, Gilbert was satirizing Britannia’s institutions: the class system, royals, the Cabinet. ‘It’s as English as Buckingham Palace garden parties and the Eton-Harrow match,’ Miller announced.

The joke-Oriental town of Titipu was transformed, by set designer Stefanos Lazaridis, into a dazzling, white Grand Hotel somewhere on the UK’s south coast, a 1930s establishment with surreal touches.¹⁴⁵ Everyone was dapper in monochrome, with hilariously pukka accents based on Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter. ‘I’m to be merried today to the men I love best,’ exclaimed Lesley Garrett’s Yum-Yum. Bonaventura Bottone’s Nanki-Poo resembled Jack Buchanan or a P. G. Wodehouse type in blazer and boater. Garrett and the other little maids from school sported gymslips, like caricatures out of an old Footlights skit or St Trinian’s.

The country’s Savoyards could have been up in arms because Miller had provocatively alluded, in the planning stages, to an ‘Entebbe raid’ on those who had assumed custody of G&S. That had only encouraged the likes of I. E. Snellgrove of East Grinstead to fume, on the Sunday Telegraph letters page, about the imminent costly wrecking of a classic.¹⁴⁸

Previous adaptations had, in fact, been more radical: the rescored jazz version The Hot Mikado, from 1939; Michael Winner’s 1963 film The Cool Mikado, with re-orchestrations incorporating the cha-cha-cha; and the reggae Black Mikado of 1975.¹⁴⁹ In the end, Miller’s production did not outrage the conservative contingent because it was frightfully British and not aggressively satirical. It repatriated the work in a teasing yet pleasing way.

His 1930s vision created a feel-good bubble, permitting escapism. Even Ko-Ko’s ‘Little List’, which slipped in up-to-the-minute digs about politicos and celebs, was delivered in a cheeky rather than a caustic humour. Sounding more high camp than highbrow, the director gayly described the show as an enormous ‘meringue’ of an entertainment – Miller light?¹⁵⁰

Jonas knew that the company was on to a winner even before opening night. As he recalls:

In rehearsals, everyone sensed that this was something extraordinary. I used to go and sit in endless performances just for the fun of it, and to recover – [feeling] the layers of damage which the Arts Council had done to me during the day peeling off like a rotten artichoke . . . It was absolutely magnificent and it became a hit such as the ENO has never known since.¹⁵¹

Miller’s Grand Hotel is now iconic, one of the most instantly recognized settings in the business. Along with Rigoletto, it made him Britain’s best-known opera director.¹⁵² The production became Christmas viewing on ITV in 1987, with an audience of three million. In the accompanying documentary, entitled An Innocent Source of Merriment, the director was filmed having such a good time that he rolled around on the floor laughing at Idle’s shoe-licking scene. ‘It was one of the greatest moments in my life, getting Jonathan Miller in hysterics!’ Idle exclaims. The Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, telecast the opera across the States as part of its Great Performances series.¹⁵³ Today it is on DVD and, with a longevity to rival Andrew Lloyd Webber’s megamusical Phantom of the Opera, it remains in the Coliseum’s repertoire, drawing fans aged eight to eighty.¹⁵⁴

To a degree, this directorial vision was personal as well as popular. Most evidently, it drew on Miller’s avid boyhood cinema-going, and maybe there was a trace of his 1939 sojourn on the south coast: that extended holiday with Nanny in Rottingdean, away from wartime London. Emanuel, in his old age, sometimes stayed at Brighton’s Grand Hotel, and his son had recently returned to the seaside with his scientific sallies to the same town.155 More fundamentally, the Thirties constituted Miller’s earliest memories of Englishness and, as he has pointed out, that decade’s influence ran on through the Forties and Fifties. Having scoffed, as a young man, at the period’s protracted fustiness and sentimentality – those awful Footlights flannels and boaters – he was now looking back with a mix of satire and nostalgia, mocking those old-school chaps in blazers, yet celebrating the era’s breezy side, its zany humour and chic style.¹⁵⁶

What, though, of his growing inner feeling that, in Britain in the Eighties, he was no longer at home?