NEARING THE NINETIES
Long Day’s Journey; the RSC; a return to the Royal Court; running the Old Vic
WHILE THE POWER HOUSE TRIUMVIRATE was holding sway at the Coliseum, Miller had, wisely, not relinquished the theatre. He staged a major Broadway show, Long Day’s Journey into Night, starring Jack Lemmon, which swiftly transferred to the West End, and that helped him leap from his terminated ENO contract to running the Old Vic.
Quite by chance, he had bumped into a Broadway producer in a hotel lobby and got chatting about who, in an ideal world, would play James Tyrone Snr, the father in Eugene O’Neill’s famed tragedy. The play was venerated as American drama’s answer to Aeschylus and Sophocles, but Miller contended that it had more in common with Neil Simon’s drunken showbiz characters in Broadway Bound. He suggested that Lemmon, known for comic movies such as Some Like It Hot, would be terrifically demythologizing, because he could portray Tyrone as a barnstorming thespian who had dwindled into a mere sour old ham, a tight-fisted dad with two recriminating sons. Becoming excited as he hatched this concept, he ended up declaring he would like to direct the piece himself.
Rehearsals speedily got under way, with the production to open at New York’s Broadhurst Theater.1 Lemmon had accepted the part instantly. ‘If Jonathan thought that I could [do it], then that was all I needed,’ he explained afterwards.2 The pair worked harmoniously together, the director loving his star’s amenable modesty. Bethel Leslie, an old friend of Lemmon’s, was cast as his morphine-addicted wife, and the fast-rising Peter Gallagher was enrolled as Edmund, the Tyrones’ tubercular writer-son.
Gallagher nearly missed his chance. He failed to attend his first audition because he was having a crisis of confidence, thinking he should become a cab driver. A phone call from the big-shot producer Emanuel Azenberg brought him to his senses.3 He picked up the receiver to be greeted by, ‘Hey, Peter, Manny here. Listen, you know I’m Jewish? Uhuh. Well, I’m also half-Italian and, if you don’t come into this next audition, I’m going to break your fucking legs.’ That was, Gallagher says, the most flabbergasting act of generosity he had ever encountered, and working with Miller was a tremendously uplifting experience (followed by roles in Steven Soderbergh’s film Sex, Lies and Videotape and Tim Robbins’ The Player).
A relative unknown at the time, Kevin Spacey was ready to beg, borrow or steal his way into playing Lemmon’s bitter actor-son, James Tyrone Jnr.4 Attending a lecture which the director was giving at the Lincoln Center’s Julliard School, he filched an invite to the ensuing drinks party, out of someone’s handbag. Nervously downing cocktails, waiting for a window of opportunity, the gatecrasher then slipped into Kurt Vonnegut’s vacated chair abutting the guest of honour. As Miller recalls:
This rather truculent young man accosted me and said I ought to audition him. He was very insistent and something about him made me think, ‘Oh, I’ll have to concede’ . . . He came along first thing the next morning and, within five minutes, I said, ‘Well, it seems you’ve got the part.’ He was so outstanding.
Somewhat exaggeratedly, Miller has complained that the actor never looked back with even a wave of gratitude, which makes the show sound rather like a Broadway hit-and-run. Spacey has, on more than one occasion, spoken of Long Day’s Journey as his breakthrough and a cherished achievement, describing Lemmon as the encouraging father figure in his career.5 When the BBC was filming its Arena documentary about Miller in 2012, he and Spacey amicably met up to reminisce on camera (at the Old Vic, which Spacey now runs).6
Though O’Neill’s family portrait is bleak, Miller characteristically brought much comic relief into the rehearsal process, and that laughter even leaked into a preview performance, when Lemmon was not yet word-perfect. Entering a festering filial scene where he should have ominously pronounced, ‘There’s a gloom in the air you could cut with a knife,’ he ad-libbed bathetically, ‘There’s a gloom in this room you could shake a stick at.’ Seized by a fit of giggles, Gallagher made full use of Edmund Tyrone’s tubercular cough, turning his back on the audience in convulsions. Sprawling on the couch, Spacey rolled over too, desperately trying to look moody while stuffing half a cushion in his mouth.
The director’s radical handling of the canonical dialogue, meanwhile, proved seriously controversial. He scorned grandiose stagings of Long Day’s Journey which lasted four hours and indulged in largo intoning, as if the running time had to live up to the title. His production came in at under three hours, because he made the repetitiously grouching Tyrones talk right over each other. A few years earlier, in the field of British new playwriting, Caryl Churchill had experimentally meshed characters’ words (notably in Top Girls at the Royal Court in 1982), but Miller could, equally, have been influenced by operatic arias for two or more voices singing at once.7 The musical analogy which he drew was, in fact, with the Grosse Fuge, Beethoven’s composition for string quartet. He played the cast a recording, and he almost conducted the play text like a score, rearranging everyone’s cues very precisely, marking their overlaid speeches with bar lines.8
The goal, though, was to recreate truly naturalistic conversations and quarrels. His Overlapped O’Neill, as it came to be called, essentially emerged from his abiding interest in the rhythms, structures and rules (or broken rules) of conversation; in what he had, even as a schoolboy comedian, referred to as the ‘sound pictures’ or ‘flux of noises’ created in verbal exchanges. He had tentatively tried overlapping lines at Nottingham Playhouse.9 With his West End Three Sisters, he had taken that further, remarking that Chekhov had an exceptional ear for real talk even while structuring his plays like sonatas.10 Conversational turn-taking had been a topic of discussion in States of Mind as well.11 He himself stresses:
Linguistics has been a major concern of mine . . . The overlapping [in Long Day’s Journey] was a small part of a much larger enterprise which was to restore the actual surface texture of ordinary speaking. When you restore the linguistic rubbish which gets written out by most playwrights in a process called rectification – the ‘um’s and ‘er’s, the half-finished sentences, ungrammatical structures and interruptions – people are shocked by the naturalism.
His wife comments, in passing, that this production sounded remarkably close to home in capturing the way families talk. ‘I don’t know if it’s worse in this household than in some, but that idea of everyone speaking at once, it certainly happens a lot here,’ she says. ‘There’s quite a fight to be heard.’
Miller predicted that his overlapping would be decried by O’Neill custodians as violent irreverence inflicted upon the master.12 The New York Times’ critic, Frank Rich, felt that the accelerated tempo spoiled the play’s slow-building power, and a Professor B. F. Dick penned an irate letter to the same publication, to which the director riposted that only a fool would estimate a drama’s greatness by its duration.13 The British press reported a flop, too controversial for mainstream American crowds, as the run ended somewhat earlier than planned.14
This was no reprise of Miller’s previous Broadway-bound fiascos, however. The Broadhurst went dark on what was termed Black Sunday, in a New York box-office slump that shut down five other straight plays.15 Long Day’s Journey ultimately received four Tony Award nominations (for the director, Lemmon, Leslie and Gallagher), and it was filmed for TV broadcast and video release. In spite of his criticisms, Frank Rich had called this Shorter Day’s Journey fascinatingly bold and fresh. Clive Barnes of the New York Post saluted it as thrillingly close to life, ‘one of the landmark productions of our time’.16
The show transferred to the West End and enjoyed high-profile coverage by Joan Bakewell on BBC TV’s Newsnight. Some reviewers harked back to Olivier’s grander portrayal of Tyrone Snr, and Miller was riled by Michael Billington who mildly questioned the tubercular Edmund’s look of rude health.17 Nonetheless, this production was hailed as magnificent, and the announcement that Miller was to become artistic director at the Old Vic was duly cheered as splendid news.18 It was time he had a place of his own.
Before he took up the post, he gained bonus points by slipping in two further hits, for the RSC and the Royal Court. His strictly Tudor Taming of the Shrew, reworked in Stratford-upon-Avon, was his overdue Royal Shakespeare Company debut at the age of 53.19 Things did not go entirely smoothly. Indeed, he nearly walked out, due to frictions with the young hotshot Fiona Shaw (his Kate).20 ‘Though we got on quite well at first,’ he says, ‘I found her argumentative feminism really too much . . . God, it was awful!’ In his view, he had to ‘take note of feminism and repudiate it’ out of respect for history. ‘The past is a foreign country,’ he underlines, ‘where they do things differently and, as I kept saying, one reason we do these plays is to visit the past.’
Barrie Rutter, who played the jocular manservant Grumio, recalls that Miller was being driven up the wall yet somehow managed to remain diplomatic. While not enamoured of the play, Shaw herself sounds surprisingly nostalgic. She speaks of relaxed rehearsals and praises Miller’s notion of Kate as a Tavistock Clinic child, behaving unlovably because unloved.
Terry Hands, who was running the RSC after Trevor Nunn’s departure, says the sparring matches between actress and director were inevitable and worked a treat, feeding into the play. The press applauded Miller for rescuing the company’s waning reputation with a Shrew that was funny, truthful and moving. Though he never worked for the company again, the show transferred to London for a lengthy run.21
As for the Royal Court, Miller had kept the artistic director Max Stafford-Clark waiting for ages, having been appointed as an associate a decade earlier.22 Finally, all was forgiven when he staged The Emperor in 1987. This dreamlike, darkly satirical chamber piece was his adaptation – co-scripted with the writer Michael Hastings – of Ryszard Kapuściński’s 1978 book of the same name. The storytelling was hypnotic, with former palace attendants recalling the last days of Haile Selassie’s autocratic reign in Ethiopia, and conjuring up a decaying hermetic world of Byzantine protocols.23 Eschewing dialogue, Miller interwove monologues with fluid role-swapping and quirky, mimed episodes.24
He enjoyed being back in cockpit conditions in the theatre’s upstairs studio, working with actors of African, Caribbean and Jordanian origins. The disabled, diminutive performer Nabil Shaban was fantastic as the beady-eyed sovereign. Gliding around in a wheelchair, he impishly bumped into the front row when imitating one of the country’s dilapidated, stalling tractors, and he waved his tiny limbs with crazed glee during a bout of collective callisthenics. The director donated his fee to the fledgling designer Richard Hudson, for the set: a dusty chamber of numerous doors and spyholes, some of which opened behind the audience’s heads or by their ankles, to reveal snooping ears and muttering lips.25 With everyone dressed in anonymous suits, it had a touch of Kafka’s Eastern Europe. The novel was, after all, a veiled analogy for Edward Gierek’s ruinous, Seventies regime in Kapuściński’s native Poland.
Fired up about Ethiopian politics, pro-Selassie demonstrators gathered outside the Royal Court, and their shouts of protest about grotesque fictions were audible throughout the press performance. Far from vitiated, the production thrilled Kapuściński, sold out in two days and was granted an extended run in the main house.26 It toured to Poland and was filmed, by Miller, for a BBC broadcast, with his trademark wide-angle distortions and deep-focus shots used to enthralling effect.27
One regrettable offstage incident had occurred, as a company member recalls:
Jonathan has these huge long arms and will occasionally wrap his arms round a person very heartily. He did that to the casting director who, ridiculously, panicked and thought he was trying to seduce her in broad daylight in her little office. There were lots of hysterical shouts of ‘Jonathan! Jonathan!’ and he came out looking absolutely sheepish. People do misunderstand him sometimes.
Some minor tensions simmered during the creative process too, with Hastings billed as Miller’s co-director but mainly just sitting at the back and observing. Hastings suggested this was a diplomatic policy:
Make no mistake, Jonathan is very edgy and competitive . . . and finds writers intrusive, but we did have a wonderful exchange of ideas. Max [Stafford-Clark] clearly knew he would have a strong affinity or interest in Eastern Europe . . . Jonathan identifies with other cultures as well as other times. I told him my family [ancestors] sailed to England from Amsterdam, coming from some unknown area in deeper Eastern Europe and just choosing the name of the town they landed in. He grinned and said, ‘Supposing it had been Bognor!’ Then his eyes lit up and he said, ‘Well, we all come from somewhere, don’t we.’ He feels that there are long distances and travels and journeys inside people . . . and, if you went that far back, they would go through Europe to, maybe, an Oriental world or Turkey or Lebanon.
Staying in London for the moment, Miller presented his first season at the Old Vic in 1988. Taking the helm as artistic director, he made everyone on board feel as if they were ‘part of one journey, one ship and one style’, according to his protégé, the now renowned director Richard Jones.28 The beautiful Victorian theatre in Waterloo, vacated by the NT company, had been bought by the Canadian father-and-son team, Ed and David Mirvish. These arts-loving businessmen (whose fortune was made through a Toronto department store) were looking for an artistic director with enough daring and flair to rival the National and draw audiences across the Thames from the hub of Theatreland.
Announcing his opening programme on a day when all Shaftesbury Avenue’s playhouses had gone dark, Miller proclaimed that his hope was to light a beacon, as it were, on a promontory above the ruthless demands of normal commercial theatre. That was possible thanks to the Mirvishes’ philanthropy, he said. It might have struck his old Apostolic associates from Cambridge as a curious venture: Schlegel-meets-Wilcox, the intellectual teaming up with trade. However, Miller’s artistic vision was financially backed without pressure to make a large profit. The Mirvishes’ intention was to break even, aiming for box-office sales of around 60 per cent.
Principally, their artistic director’s adventurousness lay in embracing European classics which, at this time, were not frequently seen in London and were regarded with some trepidation. Miller was not the first pioneer in this vein but he was Waterloo’s theatrical match for the Channel Tunnel, the digging of which coincided with his directorship. Influenced by his work on the international opera scene, he particularly concentrated on bringing stunning, continental-style set designs to the British theatre. So his Old Vic productions indeed vied with the strongly architectonic work of Germany’s Peter Stein and France’s Patrice Chéreau, as well as that of Giorgio Strehler.29
To further reinvigorate the Old Vic with a clear identity, the AD was to direct no fewer than five of the seven shows in his opening season. This generated much excitement. Box-office subscriptions rocketed and arts journalists saluted him for creating London’s most cosmopolitan and lively new repertory theatre in years. He was helping to generate a backlash against the rot which had generally invaded the West End.30
In the two and three-quarter years during which he ran the building, his audiences saw a clutch of works from the French school in English translations: Racine’s tragedy Andromache, Corneille’s metatheatrical teaser The Illusion, and the same author’s little-known comedy of mistaken identities, The Liar. Feydeau’s farce A Flea in Her Ear contributed to a strong vein of humour, together with Candide, Bernstein’s musical après Voltaire (a Scottish Opera co-production). From Eastern Europe came Brecht’s adaptation of Reinhold Lenz’s sardonic The Tutor, along with Alexander Ostrovsky’s social satire Too Clever by Half and a revolutionary drama, Marya, by the Russian–Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Visiting companies included Yuri Lyubimov’s ensemble, and Hungary’s renowned Katona József Theatre troupe, the latter with its stagings of Three Sisters and Gogol’s Government Inspector.31
In terms of neglected English dramas, George Chapman’s Jacobean tragedy Bussy D’Ambois was reclaimed. Continuing the Old Vic’s tradition of Shakespearean productions, Miller returned once more to King Lear (this time with Eric Porter in the title role). He also reworked his colonial Tempest (with the Swedish star Max von Sydow as Prospero). Lyubimov, meanwhile, brought his Russian Hamlet.32 Evidently not holding a grudge, the AD employed Fiona Shaw in As You Like It (directed by Tim Albery), and played host to Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company with their great War of the Roses cycle.
Behind the scenes, he turned one of the Old Vic’s attic rooms into his office, with utter informality. He had no desk, just a shabby armchair, a phone and piles of books – like another home from home. As with the BBC Shakespeare Series, his designers and assistants shared the space, and it functioned as a green room. Actors and stage crew wandered in and out, with coffee permanently on the go. The office was likened, at the time, to a tutor’s study-cum-common room.33 Having no closed door or appointment system was, he says, in deliberate contrast to the bureaucratic style which Peter Hall had imposed during his NT years in the Old Vic building. Instead, Miller aimed to rekindle the warmer feel of Laurence Olivier and Ken Tynan’s tenure.
After a long battle with illness, Tynan had sadly been defeated by emphysema. Miller had visited him in his last days in California, finding him fighting for breath and feeling exiled from London.34 Unable to offer any cure, he determined that Ken’s spirit of raffish humour must live on in the playhouse in SE1, and he simultaneously accentuated the family atmosphere once fostered there by Olivier (who died in 1989).35 His set designer Richard Hudson, who joined the Old Vic team after working on The Emperor, remembers Miller being immensely kind beyond the call of duty. ‘When I split up from a relationship and was wondering where I could move to,’ he says, ‘Jonathan put me in the car and drove me all over the place, saying, “What about here? What about there?” That’s the kind of thing he is brilliant at, generosity and openness.’
Miller’s regime helped advance the careers of new and up-and-coming artists, from the actors Alex Jennings and Alex Kingston (later of ER fame) to the sparky translator Ranjit Bolt and the Polish poster designer Andrzej Krauze (soon snapped up by the Guardian as a political cartoonist).36 Formerly Miller’s assistant at Scottish Opera, Richard Jones was given a big break, entrusted with Too Clever By Half and further productions. Another bright young director, Roger Michell, was brought in from the RSC (several years before his TV Buddha of Suburbia and film Notting Hill).37 With only a slim portfolio of set designs to his name, Hudson could not believe his luck either, being hired for the whole first season:
Jonathan just said, ‘Oh well, why don’t you do them all,’ and my jaw hit the floor. We had a ball. He introduced me to all sorts of things: painters, photographers, buildings. He would drive me all the way out to the East End to look at an abandoned shop window – filthy glass with old fittings behind it. And the inspiration for [the towering kiltered palace in] Andromache was the Coronet Cinema in Notting Hill which, at night, was lit from below with all the window frames casting these deep, odd shadows . . . The things that inspired him were wonderful.
The critics did not unanimously love Andromache, the first production which Miller himself directed. ‘It was an uphill struggle,’ he sighs, and that was literally true for his cast. This was very much his tilt-the-stage phase, and he had Racine’s neoclassical, doomed House of Atreus on a precipitous incline.38 Playing the titular stoical Trojan, Janet Suzman relished the production’s strange hieratic gestures and surprising passion, but her royal sufferings on the slope soon included housemaid’s knee.39 Cast as the rival princess Hermione, Penelope Wilton loved the visually austere look and her Fortuny-style, pleated, silk dress, except when she whisked round to exit from one scene and accidentally climbed up her own skirt, collapsing in a tangle on the floor.
A few reviewers took issue with the translation by Miller’s old school friend, Eric Korn, questioning its sporadically slangy idioms. Only weeks before rehearsals started, the AD had decided that Craig Raine’s commissioned adaptation – envisaging a 1950s, Nazi royal family – would not work. Korn obligingly penned the substitute at top speed. Miller still prizes it as superbly vibrant, reviling the critics’ ‘lordly condescension’.40 Korn shrugged, saying he had fun indulging his suppressed yearning for glitter and greasepaint.41
A fair number of the press were, in fact, encouraging. ‘If the rest of [Miller’s] season at the Old Vic is as powerful as this [Andromache] . . . attendance will be compulsory,’ declared the Independent, and the first year of programming netted five Olivier Awards.42 The AD’s own staging of Candide, with Patricia Routledge on board, won the Best Musical category, for striking just the right balance between the work’s American writers and its European source.43 The famously picky Bernstein flew over, apparently loved it, and was filmed backstage for its BBC telecast. Ebulliently pinching Miller on the cheek, he exclaimed, ‘Hey, I think we’ve got it for the first time!’44
Two Olivier Awards went to Jones’ Too Clever by Half which was a huge hit: Jennings won Best Comedy Performance and the director was named Most Promising Newcomer, while Hudson was chosen as Best Designer of the Year for his whole residency.45 Miller confesses that, as with Moshinsky on the BBC Shakespeare Series, he felt a bit irked about Jones being so very dazzling when, as he remembers it, ‘most of my productions did rather badly’.
In its entirety, his tenure was chequered. Eric Porter’s Lear was much admired. As You Like It was not. Miller’s comically sparkling The Liar was adored (with Jennings and Desmond Barrit as a master-servant double act), and he was proud of his Bussy d’Ambois (with David Threlfall as the Machiavellian court’s malcontent), yet Chapman’s knotty poetry was slated as dull and arcane.46 He freely admits that his programming misfired with The Tutor.47 Directed by a veteran colleague of Brecht’s, it bombed, and his own staging of N. F. Simpson’s absurdist One Way Pendulum looked more dated than he expected. Two decades had passed since he had starred in the film version.48 Though the piece was strongly cast (with John Fortune and John Bird), it played to frighteningly small houses, the nadir being 65 bums on 1,000 seats.
Economically, this was a disaster even if other productions such as Candide and the Max von Sydow Tempest played to full capacity.49 The proprietors had miscalculated at the outset, according to the Old Vic’s financial manager, Andrew Leigh. He suggests that, driven by a zeal to realize their dream, the Mirvishes had been Panglossian optimists. Most West End investors aim to be breaking even when their ticket sales reach around 30 per cent. To hope for 60 per cent to cover one’s costs was dangerous. ‘We never overspent by a penny,’ Leigh emphasizes. ‘The income target was unrealistic.’ The theatre lost money, averaging 50 per cent at the box office in the first year. Try as he might by upping the quota of Shakespeare – familiar name, safer bet – Miller could not get out of the woods.
Clinging on to his sense of humour, David Mirvish recounts how, on his initial trips to London, he would stay at the Savoy but, as the Old Vic consumed his cash, he ended up at the unbelievably seedy Jubilee Hotel, next to Stringfellows strip club.50 Summoned to the Jubilee for a meeting, Miller rushed in yelping that he hadn’t, surely, lost so much money that it had come to this! Mirvish may have been making a point, yet he is only half-joking when he says: ‘We stopped before I had to sell my art collection.’ Feeling the pinch was not painless. Still, Mirvish adds, ‘It’s not Jonathan’s fault. That I would never say.’
Miller recognizes that the Mirvishes were extremely generous, but he was livid at the time when the cash flow stopped in medias res. This was in October 1990. Leigh was on holiday in Greece when he picked up an English newspaper and reeled with shock, seeing the headline, ‘Miller Quits Old Vic’. Two complementary productions – A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Botho Strauss’s modern variation, The Park – had been in rehearsal when Mirvish suddenly pulled the plug, announcing they were not viable. Miller walked out almost instantly, leaving instructions that his wages should be distributed among the actors. Though Mirvish expressed regrets about the exigency and paid the actors more compensation than anticipated, he was vilified.51
That is not, however, quite the whole story. Even if the artistic director had been in his element at the Old Vic, he privately veered between elation and despair in his first year, depressed by the negative reviews. It was rumoured, in 1989, that he was tempted to move to California, with the offer of a professorial chair at UCLA.52 He did not opt for that but he had, actually, tendered his resignation a couple of months before The Park and The Dream were summarily axed. He was due to leave in March 1991.53 Leigh ruminates: ‘David would never in a million years have got rid of Jonathan. He said he was terribly sorry [about his imminent departure] . . . though I think he was slightly relieved.’
Other associates question if Miller honoured the vow he made when appointed as artistic director. ‘If I work there, I work there,’ he had promised, with reference to Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall’s much criticized absenteeism from the RSC and NT. Apart from one or two prior engagements, he said, it would be ‘total commitment’.54 In practice, he was not wholly devoted. His attention was never undivided.
Truth be told, there was a great deal of absenteeism when he was artistic director. In 1988, his schedule included the pre-booked Mikado in LA with Dudley Moore and two TV series. My God, on ITV, saw him presenting and discussing questions of faith with Iris Murdoch, Don Cupitt and others. Fronting Channel 4’s Four Virtuosos, he interviewed great musicians including the pianists Murray Perahia and Vladimir Ashkenazy.55 In the next year and nine months, before Mirvish’s shutdown, he directed only Lear and The Liar at the Old Vic, while the number of projects elsewhere was fairly staggering.
Whether he was itching to be free of bureaucratic responsibilities or was simply responding to invitations, several trips abroad occurred in 1989–90. He revived The Mikado in Houston and tackled Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny for LA Opera, making Brecht and Weill’s satire of capitalist greed distinctly local, placing it on what looked like the Hollywood set of Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush.56
Heading out to Florence, he reworked Don Giovanni, and he edited a book of fine scholarly essays on the roving playboy, entitled The Don Giovanni Book: Myths of Seduction and Betrayal.57 During this stretch, he returned to directing for BBC Television’s drama department, in a philosophical vein. Dialogue in the Dark, by Michael Ignatieff, featured the death-obsessed James Boswell (David Rintoul) encountering the sagely atheistic, ailing David Hume (Alec McCowen).58 Again for the BBC and almost concurrently, he was fronting the medical five-parter Who Cares?, about coping with illness and ageing.59
Also broadcast during his Old Vic tenure, Channel 4’s profile, Jonathan Miller: A Full Life, could not have been more aptly named, especially as he had managed to land two more BBC TV series.60 In Born Talking he explored language and the brain.61 Ensconced in a book-lined den, he grappled with the theories of Chomsky (one of his top interviewees) and revisited his beloved topics of neurological dysfunction, conversational turn-taking and non-verbal communication – mimicking a buzzing Jewish bee for light relief.62 The press humorously surmised that this presenter had, in all probability, been talking eruditely when still in the womb. His handling of complex topics mightily impressed them, even if Chomsky made Nancy Banks-Smith’s brain hurt.63
The other series was Madness. This was a history of the subject, looking into the rise and fall of asylums, Hitler’s gassing of the mentally ill, psychoanalysis, drug therapies, and shifting definitions of madness (with the final episode called ‘In Two Minds’). The reviews picked up on how Miller, even more directly than in his book on Freud, cast trenchant doubts on his father’s profession.64
On top of all this, he was to be seen expounding his theory of comedy in What’s So Funny About That?, a special made for the BBC science documentary strand Q.E.D. Here he offered a perceptive alternative to his famous relative Henri Bergson’s seminal ideas on the subject. Rather than pursuing Bergsonian ideas about automata-like behaviour, he expanded on his own observation that, fundamentally, what makes us laugh is the assigning of things to wrong slots – unexpected errors of categorization or classification.65
It is a persuasive thesis, better than Bergson’s. However, the Mirvishes were probably not amused by the professional category-jumping that kept dislodging their artistic director from his Waterloo pigeonhole. Of course, Miller’s television appearances, extending to chat-shows and arts programmes, provided free extra publicity for the Old Vic.66 Even his clash on The Late Show with the anti-abortionist Victoria Gillick, when she called him a mouth-on-legs, became an instant cause célèbre.67 To his credit, too, many of those whom he directed between 1988 and 1990 found him perfectly concentrated, in spite of his multitasking.68
Nevertheless, the notion that his Old Vic post required more hard graft was voiced by his former Footlights friend, Frederic Raphael. He called Miller’s programming ‘a repertory season of his old ideas’, meaning that the erstwhile groundbreaker was now going over old ground.69 John Fortune, in turn, described being in One Way Pendulum:
As far as I remember, we rehearsed for three weeks and Jonathan never stopped us once! . . . It was either that he thought it was perfect or he was thinking about something entirely different. It was very odd. There was this scene and Jonathan never decided whether or not it was going to be cut. On the day that the play was to open in Toronto [at the Mirvishes’ Royal Alexandra Theatre, prior to its Old Vic run], Jonathan was in Los Angeles [working on The Mikado], and we were all standing round saying, ‘Well, are we doing this scene or not?’ John Bird came out with the wonderful line: ‘This is direction by rumour!’
One journalist who attended a Candide rehearsal, when Miller was not present, recorded more ferocious mutterings. The piece was co-adapted by John Wells and he was trying to co-stage it. Cast members were calling him ‘bloody amateurish’ and saying the absentee was an addict, hooked on making public appearances.70 Another colleague, with hindsight, comments: ‘I think Jonathan is a workaholic . . . of the sort who abuses work by making sure he’s got so much of it that there’s a really good excuse for not doing it properly.’
Finally, the hitherto unmentioned factor, which immediately preceded Miller and David Mirvish’s split, was the latter having to go to another venue with Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. The theatre owner wished to produce its London premiere and wooed the composer, but Miller resisted. With exasperation mounting on both sides, Mirvish ended up realizing his ambition, in September 1990, at the West End’s Phoenix Theatre. The staging was directed by Richard Jones and designed by Hudson, with Leigh moonlighting as executive producer. It won multiple awards.71
After that glittering triumph, Mirvish sharply refocused his attention on the Old Vic and reassessed the fact that, having unwisely agreed to a huge set, he stood to lose half a million pounds on the Botho Strauss/Midsummer Night’s Dream bill. Moreover, that was assuming 60 per cent ticket sales. So, he cut his losses.72
Inevitably, there was bitterness during the bust-up, and yet that is largely forgotten now. It is also worth pointing up, by way of financial comparisons, that London saw the Barbican go dark in 1990, due to an RSC deficit of £4 million pounds, and Covent Garden was £3 million in the red, having to cancel its new productions. Today, Mirvish prizes Miller’s artistic achievement and long-term cultural influence, stating:
Many people said Jonathan wouldn’t stick it out for even one year, but we did it for nearly three . . . and I think they were the best of all our years at the Old Vic [which was sold on in 1998]. Jonathan had the most compelling vision . . . and I believe he achieved that. I think he had a profound impact on English theatre that still echoes. It was a gift, a gift worth receiving, and I’m proud to have been part of it. That’s the bottom line . . . When I went to see shows in other theatres, I could see the impact, visually. People also said very nice things at the end of our tenure and probably the best compliment I had was [the director] Stephen Daldry saying how much the Miller years affected the way younger professionals looked at theatre.
Before going on to run the Royal Court and direct Billy Elliot, Daldry started out at Notting Hill’s tiny Gate Theatre in 1990. There he staged thrilling foreign classics, continuing Miller’s legacy, with fewer seats to sell. In the same year, Ian McDiarmid teamed up with Jonathan Kent and took over the now renowned Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London. McDiarmid states: ‘Yes, those pioneering seasons at the Old Vic were an inspiration . . . We weren’t particularly looking for models, but we kept saying, ‘The sort of thing Jonathan was doing.’’73
Miller has never run another building. He could have sought out an alternative space in London, the ideal cockpit theatre of which he had once spoken.74 Or he might have followed in Peter Brook’s footsteps, settling on the arts-cherishing continent with something comparable to Brook’s Parisian Bouffes du Nord playhouse. He chose not to be tied to any single institution. What he did, instead, was accelerate away and take off, in top gear now, as a stellar freelancing director on the international opera circuit. This is the final large-scale movement of his career: staging productions at many of the world’s leading opera houses including La Scala, working everywhere from New Mexico to Tokyo, and eventually circling back to the homelands of his grandparents, Sweden and Lithuania.