A preoccupation with the negligible
Jonathan Miller, in reflective mood, talks to Henrietta Bredin about his work on stage Jonathan Miller possesses the great gift of making those with a lesser intellect than his feel that they are, at the very least, keeping up. His memory is capacious, his powers of analysis rigorous and his observation penetrating, but this combination, while formidable, is not daunting. Rather, in conversation, his delight in catching fire from other people's contributions and in developing ideas further is infectious and stimulating. Norman Douglas once wrote, 'Whoever has helped us to a larger understanding is entitled to our gratitude for all time.' Miller both inspires that gratitude in others and feels it keenly himself.
In a lengthy and discursive discussion over the kitchen table, fuelled by strong coffee and nicotine and punctuated by bouts of snorting laughter, we talked mostly about Miller's work on stage. He has, regrettably, worked very little in the UK in recent years, but earlier this year he directed The Cherry Orchard at the Sheffield Crucible and in 2008 will direct Hamlet at the Tobacco Factory in Bristol, and he is in discussion with English National Opera about a new production.
Now in his early seventies, he is, he says, 'as vigorous as ever, touch wood', but is acutely and frustratedly aware that at his age he has limited time in which to pursue the numerous things which still interest him 'I stand on the beach and look out across this enormous rolling ocean of what is to be known and realise that there is absolutely no chance of knowing it now.'
This may be true, but he does of course already know a great deal and has read and researched intensively all his life. 'There are several people who've had a long-lasting influence on me and none of them have themselves got anything to do with the theatre,' he says. 'One of them is the American philosopher John Searle, who wrote an extraordinary book called Speech Acts. He makes the distinction between the meaning of a sentence or utterance as an intelligible passage of English, by virtue of its syntax and the meaning of its individual words, and the meaning that is conveyed by the utterer, which does not depend simply on the grammatical structure but on who is uttering it, under what circumstances and to whom.'
So these differences in meaning and emphasis can be applied as well to Chekhov's deceptively simple prose as to the layered complexities of Shakespeare's verse?
'Yes. Our entire discourse is filled with these shifting implications — and, until you have intuitively identified what the nature of the speech act is, you haven't got to the heart of who's saying it and how to say it. In my production of Cosi fan tutte at the Royal Opera House, the characters are constantly checking themselves in the mirror, so certain things that they say or do are very different because they're looking at themselves and aware of themselves, rather than addressing another character or the audience. It can be enormously revealing.
'Now Searle derived his ideas, interpreting them in a linguistic sense, from another philosopher, John Austin. And those ideas were also taken up by the anthropologist Erving Goffman, who's had a vast influence on everything I do in the theatre.'
Miller is well into his stride by now. He is an extremely physical talker, hands curved and shaping the air, or flat and chopping for emphasis. And in his eagerness to make his meaning clear, he frequently interrupts himself with offers to run upstairs and find a relevant book, to show me a photograph or drawing as illustration. His explanations are vividly chiselled, characterised by an extensive, precisely selected and saltily pungent vocabulary.
'Austin wrote an essay called "A Plea for Excuses", about the excuses and exculpations we offer to one another for what we believe to be, or what might be seen as, a faulty performance. It might be criminal, for example, as in "I didn't know the gun was loaded".' He makes this enormously elaborate and beautifully detailed analysis of the range of excuses that people give for what they do, the purpose of which is to restore the image they would like to have of themselves. And Goffman follows that idea to observe people's physical behaviour and the way in which we are all, by virtue of being social creatures, subject to the scrutiny of others, to anonymous gazes. So if someone trips in the street, they invariably look back at the pavement as if to shift the blame on to it. And when someone farts, they'll push back their chair [he does so, dramatically] so that the noise will cover up, or replace the sound — "It was the chair, not me." There's a whole sequence of accusation, conviction and punishment that's over in seconds. It happens all the time on the stage: things that aren't in the stage directions but which give the thing its reality. Unless you introduce this what I call behavioural rubbish, which is very easily neglected and overlooked, you don't get the complicated and elaborate tissue of self-presentation that brings the performance to life.'
I had noticed, when I sat in on a rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard at the beginning of February, that Miller never tells actors what to do.
'I think that most directing consists of reminding people of what they actually knew all along — and getting them to forget what they ought never to have known in the first place. All these seemingly trivial behavioural things, this apparently irrelevant rubbish, enables actors to reveal what is really going on. There's always a lot of conversation in and around my rehearsals, but it's not a distraction, it's part of it. If I'm doing an aria with Renee Fleming, say 'Dove sono' from The Marriage of Figaro, we would talk about the state of isolated depression that her character has fallen into and she'll realise that it makes more sense to sit rather than stand. Then I might suggest that she stares into space while she's singing but that there might be an unconscious physical action that she performs at the same time. She starts to rub her index finger along the fabric of the arm of the chair and there it is we can see that she's in a state of idle despair.'
In an opera, I suggest, as opposed to a play, music has the ability to stretch time, so that there's more space for gesture. A singer may be expressing a single thought but it takes longer to do so and they may feel that they have to fill that time with something bigger.
'But it doesn't have to be overblown and consciously operatic. A tiny thing will inform the next action; it could be an action or a prop, and then, as Wittgenstein said, they "know how to go on". Like Arthur Davies as the Duke [in his "mafioso" production of Rigoletto for ENO] when he's waiting in the bar for Maddalena to come. He pulled out a comb and arranged his hair into that duck's-arse shape at the back, then he knew how to go on from there. When I worked with Olivier on The Merchant of Venice, the designer, Julia Trevelyan Oman, gave him an immaculate, polished briefcase for the court scene. He'd click it open, carefully take out his papers, then close it and meticulously put it down beside him The details which accompanied the speeches naturalised the speeches. Shylock wants his revenge, so he comes prepared.
'All of this is about my preoccupation with the negligible, the things we do that are barely noticeable, but that make up our lives. My mother had a novelist's eye for detail and she said to me when I was about 14, and asking her if I could go away to France for a holiday, "Of course you can if you want to but you must remember travel narrows the mind." And what she meant by that is something that has remained with me ever since, that if you don't see it where you are, you'll never see it anywhere.'
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