Jonathan Miller - Theatre and Opera Director HARDtalk

private investment. On BBC News, time for HARDtalk. Welcome to

HARDtalk. My guests today has had a career of mind-boggling diversity

and creativity, at devise an easy label. Jonathan Miller, is known as

a director and producer of brown theatre. He is also a writer,

performer, sculptor and photographer, who trained in

medicine and sometimes seems more fulfilled by science than his life

in the arts. For five decades, he has been a dominant figure in

British cultural life, but he has never seemed entirely at ease with

HARDtalk. Thank you, it is nice to be here. Scientists and artists. Is

it possible for you to tell me which matters more to you? It is quite

hard to put any sort of emphasis on one at the expense of another. I was

brought up and learnt to be a biological scientist, eventually

taking up the medicine. Then, by an accident, fell into the theatre, and

went on to do it as a result of receiving many invitations to do

more. Can I start without? Were you seduced by performance, by the

stage? By the adoration of crowds question mark absolutely not.

just that I had finished qualifying as a doctor. Someone came from

Oxford, saying, would I like to take part in a show at the Edinburgh

Festival? It was with two people from Oxford, me and someone from

cabbage. It was much more successful than any of us thought it would be

-- Cambridge. It played in London for nearly 18 months. And to remind

people who aren't aware of how big it was, we're about names that

resonated for years. Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and you.

We come back to this notion of seduction. You had in on a track to

go into scientific research... neurophysiology and neuropsychology.

I thought that I would take time out, I never thought it would lead

to a succession of unsolicited invitations to do something else.

suppose, particularly since the publication of a long biography of

you recently, which was titled, in two minds, there is a temptation to

see a constant tension within Europe between the desire to prove yourself

as a scientist, and your equally strong attraction to performance, to

directing, to that world of entertainment. I was always

interested... Performance was something I did very briefly, for

that to a half years. I never performed again. I used to present

television, but that was not performance, that was a way of

talking about my interests. I went on doing television for the history

of medicine and that sort of thing, I talk to psychologists and so

forth. I don't think I felt, I was in two minds. I wished I had gone in

-- gone on ?I ? -- gone on tended to do, or which my parents intended

me to do, but something cropped up which I could never have

anticipated. I don't want to sit here and sound like a very

unqualified psychiatrists, but your father was a psychiatrist, a very

famous one. I was just wondering whether, throughout your life, for

all of the successes we will talk about in theatre and opera and

elsewhere, there was a nagging sense that you should be someone else?

Yes. I felt I will take time out, do the show, make some extra money,

because you did not get paid much as a junior doctor. I thought it would

give me a little more affluence and I could take up jobs that won't that

well-paid in those days. One thing led to another. I just simply

Mariano Rajoy -- gradually drifted away. All the interests I had

developed from the age of about 16 onwards in biology and in the

history of ideas continue to preoccupy me to this day. We will

talk about this later. I want to get into theatre now. Your career is

amazing in that one looks through the course of it, and you have done

a lot of Shakespeare. You've been with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

You have done New York. You have directed performances all over the

world. You have worked with Laurence Olivier, all sorts of greats. And

yet, again, an odd thing. You don't seem to like the theatre that much.

It is not that I dislike it, I like doing it, but I don't like going to

it. My parents used to take me to the old Vic, and I could remember

seeing Shakespeare. Nowadays, the last 20 or 30 years, I have hardly

gone to the theatre, I enjoy making it and doing it. There are tasks

that preoccupy me, which go back to what it was that interested me in

medicine. You make it sound almost a soulless and technical... No, it is

a way of really investigating what the soul is, if it exists. One of

the things that preoccupies me about the theatre and performance, what is

it for someone to be a living person? What is it that I would

encourage them as a director to do to convince the audience that they

are in the presence of someone other than the actor who is doing it on

the stage. I was very struck by something you told the New York

Times years ago, that you, it was about the little details. We talk

about the size you worked with, and no one could begin with anyone other

than Olivier, even for him, was a key question of persuading him the

tiniest of details on stage, the mannerisms, the hand movements that

they matter in must lay. That is what this is all about. That is what

I was encouraged to direct my attention to as a young doctor will

stop the diagnostic skill is partly to do with noticing something which

would otherwise pass unrecognised. Then, you build up a diagnosis on

the basis of it. You worked with Olivier when you were relatively a

young director, and he was an ageing superstar. You have always had a

repetition for being forceful. Never forceful. If I was forceful, it was

because I reminded people, my performance of what they knew

anyway. The forcefulness was just simply them saying, oh yes, of

course, how stupid not to have remembered that will stop I have

never, with one or two exceptions, ever bullied someone to do things

that they did not recognise was truthful. If you don't mind, we will

come back to that. But I am struck with you not having worked in

theatre for sometime, you are back and you have a play that was not

very well known. I admit I did not know it. I did not know much about

it, at all. I was invited to do it, I read it, I thought it was

marvellous. I have been doing it on tour. Having not done it for six

years, and this is a quote from the Independent newspaper, you said, I

am not interested in the theatre and frank we never was, are you would

juices flowing again? They always were flowing. I enjoyed doing

theatre, I enjoy directing. Not because I am dictatorial. It is not

directing in that sense. I like the collective experience of working

from 10am in the morning until 530 in the evening with people finding

out how to be someone else. Talking about Olivier and the past, do you

think that right now in theatre, I am thinking of the London West End,

there is a preoccupation with getting the biggest names,

particularly for movies and television onto the stage. Is it

getting in the way of good production? Yes, I think it might

be. I don't know, because I have not seen many of them. To be fair, it

hasn't stopped you from commenting. I comment only in the sense that if

you are interested only in casting celebrities, the chances are that

you are not interested in directing the negligible details of reality.

That is the only thing that the -- interests me. I am very interested

in people doing things, and getting people who are pretending to be

someone else to do things so realistically that the audience can

actually maintain this double vision of delighting in the fact that they

are seeing this that or the other known actor pretending to be someone

who they aren't will stop isn't there something really important

about getting big names into the theatre, in the sense that, I can

speak from personal experience, I took my daughter to see Macbeth.

knew from a couple of movies who he was. I looked around, there were

more than an average number of young people. Young boys and girls in the

audience. It seemed to me that was what one way in which theatre is

reaching out to a new audience. Maybe now that is the case. There is

a great deal of, as you know in this medium, in all media, there is a

preoccupation with celebrity. And I think that an awful lot of young

people have become seduced by famous names, and they will go to see

someone who is famous am rather than engaging in the absolutely

extraordinary experience of seeing people are tending to be people that

they are not. Of course, Olivier was a superstar. Perhaps you are judging

these names today because then made their names in television, and

perhaps you don't care to that. but there were still lots of people

who were not superstars, when I'd worked with Olivier, I worked with

extremely distinguished younger actors who were not at that time

very famous, but who were extraordinary. Olivier, I bless him

to this, never loomed larger than the other people with whom he was

working. He just simply took part in a community of performance. That was

what was so attractive. I think that when people came to see it, although

there were obviously delighted to see someone like him, they were also

delighted to see that he was participating in something where in

fact lots of people were acting really. The cliched phrase is,

dumbing down. I wonder if you, when surveying British culture, looking

across theatre and television, whether you sense a dumbing down of

high art. Do you worry about it? do worry about it. It means people

are distracted from most of what is interesting about high art, if there

is such a term. The arts are interesting, all should be

interesting, because it actually draws your attention to aspects of

reality and aspects of your own personal experience, which you would

otherwise overlook. That is the only thing that interests me. What is

something that is alive? How does it display itself and make itself

distinct from the inanimate? But it is also important to reach a broad

audience. I do not think that is important at all. You are happy to

put on a show that attracts an elite audience? Not an elite audience, but

an audience that already has an interest in seeing something like

that, in seeing something real. Not interested in having a statistically

larger number of people coming to watch it then otherwise would. It is

very nice, in fact, if the theatre is packed. But I am perfectly happy

to have a theatre... Everyone in the cast is happy if there are 400

people there, rather than 2000. did a lot of work in opera, not just

in London. All over the world.We have talked a lot about your

relationship with the bigger stars. You had a very difficult

relationship... She wanted to do something that was not proper. She

wanted to put in two arias. It would make her more noticeable. You said

they were Jurassic. If I go on doing the same part, over and over

again... They assume they know the person they are playing. The person

they are playing does not exist. There are an infinite number of

versions of the person who bears that name, that might be the

difference in the way in which you, or whoever, has played it

previously. I wonder if you ever sought to intimidate. Either you

were directing or producing for the theatre. No. I have always just

chatted to people. That is how I direct. Informal conversations. I

would usually say, "Wouldn't it be interesting to say..." I would not

put people into fixed positions. When you're singing, we were

thinking out loud, you must face in one direction and fiddle with your

clothes, while we were talking. was a fascinating example. Almost

all of the interesting performers, as opposed to the Jurassic Park

singers, would say I was right. "I have suddenly discovered the way to

sing that aria, which I did not know how to do before." Let me flip this

around a bit. Let me put the spotlight on you. As a star and one

of the most famous directors in your time, to be honest about it, do you

thank you had been too thin-skinned, over the years, for your own good?

--think that you. I'm thin-skinned about being written about by people

who the audience never meet. There is a wonderful scene where the girls

go out to some mysterious place, where the Wizard of Oz is. This

voice booms out of them. The little dog runs across and pulls aside the

curtain. And you reveal the person who has been the Voice and he is a

negligible figure. If you are frequently written about and you

suddenly realise, if only the public had seen the man behind the curtain,

they maybe... You may disagree with that critic. But he probably was not

delivering his verdict with malign intent. Yet you take it very

personally. For example, one famous incident, you reacted really badly

to criticism from Tom Sutcliffe. Then you happened to meet him. And

then you had a huge row with him. You allegedly said, "I wish you were

dead." I never said anything like that. I did not like him. He has

this way of condescending upwards. Talking about condescension,

superiority and inferiority. Here is a fabulous quote from you. You said

having your work assessed by some of the London critics was akin to

rolling a Faberge egg under a pigsty door. In some respects, I do think

that. You have one heck of a superiorty complex. I know what I

can do and I know many of them cannot do it - it's comparable

things. It is very irritating to be written about by people like the man

behind the curtain, that the little dog could pull the curtain, so the

public could see the person. I see what you're saying about critics.

This is not just about critics. This is a journalistic exaggerated thing,

the friction. It is true, is it not? You have called Peter Hall a

safari-styled bureaucrat. I am not certain I ever said anything like

that. I worked with him very briefly after having worked with a much

greater figure, Laurence Olivier, who employed me. Then I was kept on

by Peter Hall in order to give the impression he was not sacking the

people who were his predecessors' stars. I did not get on with him. I

did have an enormous amount of condescension from him. I just got

out. Then he began to talk about me in a way which I found was very

irritating. It was a madness, that misrepresentation of why I got out.

You get judged and it is difficult sometimes. Obviously for you.

just irritating. You strike me as somebody, in the broader sense, as a

sensitive man. I get irritated. But I never met anyone who works in the

theatre and who does not have the same sort of feeling about this

curious sort of condescension which they experience from critics.

of them did not get in the press, like I do because I write. You have

the gift of the phrase. I want to move on from that.

This is difficult, in a way, but in deeper terms, at times of your

creative life, you have actually struggled. Struggled to find the

energy to be creative. You have suffered from depression,

have you? I get gloomy. But most people do, at one time or another. I

do not think about creativity. I think about what I thought about

when I was doing medical science or biological science. Theatre has

struck me as something in which you can be interesting because you have

recognised, unidentified aspects of human life or aspects of biological

life which previously had not been seen. That is the only reason why I

do it. I am driven by something that is sociological, or scientific

curiosity. Most of the scientific and socialogical curiosity is driven

by a determination to see what had not been recognised before. You have

taken a particular path. You have struggled with your skills and

talents in the sciences and art. Do you regret some of the decisions you

have taken? Maybe even the path you have taken? Not really, no. But it

would have been nicer to go on looking at people with pretty

serious brain damage in order to understand what seeing and acting

consists of. You once said something very striking. You were asked what

you would like your legacy to be. You said, "One respected scientific

paper would be the legacy I would really like." I might have thought

that at one time. I am perfectly happy to have people see a

production of mine, which drew their attention to aspects of a human

existence which they had previously not noticed. That is what is so

interesting about the arts and the sciences. When you come up with a

scientific truth, you actually draw people's attention to the aspects of