Jonathan Miller

Of all the people I didn't know who died in 2019, I was most saddened by the death of Jonathan Miller.  He was an important presence at various times in my life.  When I was in college in the 1960s, one of my teachers (Douglas Wilson) mentioned this comedic satire by four young Englishmen called Beyond the Fringe. I soon acquired the album from their Broadway show, and pretty much memorized many of the bits.  In many ways it was life-changing, and certainly influenced my creative life for a long time.

The four members of Beyond the Fringe--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Arnold Bennett and Jonathan Miller--were the Beatles of comedy.  Without Beyond the Fringe there would have been no Monty Python or Firesign Theatre, and possibly no Douglas Adams or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. 

 But they were an artificial supergroup of funny guys from Oxford and Cambridge assembled by the official Edinburgh Festival to compete with its unofficial fringe festival comedies. They were such a hit they moved on to a commercial gig in London, and then to New York. After their Broadway success they disbanded, but while Bennett cultivated a career as a playwright, the other three stayed in the public eye throughout the 60s.  Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were the most visible, on British TV and a few Hollywood films (notably Bedazzled.) Miller was studying medicine, but kept get invitations to direct plays, TV shows and movies.

Meanwhile in my life, after intense periods in Boston and Washington, I returned to western Pennsylvania in the late 70s.  I was freelancing for magazines and then working on a book, so my life consisted of short bursts of travel and long periods of relative isolation.  My intellectual stimulation came chiefly from reading, and was mostly embodied by precious moments on film and especially on television.

The Body in Question, Miller's series carried in the US on PBS stations about the history of medicine, was one of the programs of the golden age for such stimulating series that included Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, the James Burke programs, Robert Hughes' The Art of the New, Ronald Harwood's theatre history All the World's A Stage, and Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Probably the last were produced by Bill Moyers into the 1990s.  All of these were as important to my mental nourishment, sense of self, and my sanity.

Though Miller stopped formal performing, he was such an engaging talker that he was often featured on American talk shows, which were far more present and far more likely to hold some intellectual interest in the 60s into the 80s than since. In particular, he was given entire hours by Dick Cavett in the 1980s, often several strung together. His marvellous intelligence was inspiring and encouraging as well as stimulating. Miller's talk was absolute sustenance to me in those years.

 While I was aware of Miller as producer and director of several Shakespeare plays for the BBC project of filming all of them, and I'd heard him talk about at least one of them, it was years later in California when I was writing regularly about theatre that I watched tapes of these productions provided by the Humboldt University library.  It was then that I read with great interest his 1986 book Subsequent Performances, about approaching new productions of classic plays. Even more recently I caught up with his provocative 1960s television adaptation--or reimagining--of Alice in Wonderland on DVD.

directing Alice in Wonderland

In these and other ways, Jonathan Miller was a presence in my life over 5 decades, even though I didn't know him, never met him, and never saw on stage a production he directed.  Now, since his death was announced in November, I've been reading about him (including in a 1992 book, A Profile of Jonathan Miller), re-reading Subsequent Performances and watching what I could find on YouTube. There's actually quite alot: many interviews--including the 80s appearances on Cavett and several with Clive James, who died the same week as Miller--and several television dramas he directed.  I've deepened my knowledge of the man and his achievements.

As a director, producer and administrator of the Old Vic, he brought a fearless originality to his theatrical productions, while at the same time endearing himself to the people he worked with--particularly actors--with his humor, encouragement and respect for their own creativity.  Though he was the victim of clueless criticism, he got good notices as well.  Many of his theatre productions were hits with audiences, and several of his opera productions ran for decades.  Though I probably would not have agreed with some of his interpretations, they were dazzling in their daring and internal consistency.

Early in his directing career he mounted new plays and adaptations, with authors generally enthusiastic about his approach.  Even when he tended to stay with older works and favored Shakespeare and Chekhov in particular, he also rediscovered older plays seldom done on the modern stage, and brought a range of European plays to the British mainstream, particularly when he ran the Old Vic.

directing John Cleese in BBC Taming of the Shrew

Though Miller brought conceptual frameworks to his productions, and coordinated designs (often selecting painters for his designers to see), he felt his contributions as a director were in details--in small moments and gestures by the actors.  His approach was informed by what his novelist mother told him was a function of fiction: to make the negligible considerable, and the forgettable memorable. The job of directing, he felt, was directing attention.

He used his experience as a doctor observing everything about a patient to collect small human gestures which he suggested to his actors.  To the madness of Lear and other characters, he brought medical knowledge of how disorder or old age are expressed in concrete behavior.

Bob Hoskins and Anthony Hopkins in
Miller's BBC-TV Othello

 While his interpretations were sometimes controversial, they were grounded in history and had a particular logic, often based on actual human behavior rather than a metaphorical conceit.

Some changed how many plays are now approached.  For example, after his working class Iago (Bob Hoskins), no production of Othello can ignore the precedent.  He made the racial components of Othello and The Merchant of Venice more realistic by softening the apparent differences, while revealing and sharpening racial divides in The Tempest--also an interpretation no subsequent production can ignore.

He enlivened classics like Hamlet and Lear and several Chekhov plays partly by emphasizing characters that are usually played as minor, such as Claudius in Hamlet. He approached opera as another kind of play, bringing new interest to audiences.

Those who worked with him often mentioned his humor, and the sense of rehearsal as play.  "For me, what is attractive about the stage is contained in the name of what it is we do," he wrote.  "It is a play and is playful."

 He wrote this to explain his conflict at the National when Peter Hall took over.  He felt Hall (who I praise in an earlier memorial post) was too pretentious about the role of theatre.  He had enjoyed the National in the early years, when he worked closely with Lawrence Olivier, who he greatly admired.


In A Profile of Jonathan Miller, a notable number of actors and producers name Tyrone Guthrie as Miller’s closest resemblance in directorial style. In addition to his humor, they often mentioned his warmth with actors, inventiveness and keen eye for behavior. He began productions with a strong sense of time and place, and with a visual style selected, but collaborated closely with designers and actors to produce effects that worked for them, the audience and the show.

 Miller’s work in directing opera transformed opera productions down to the present. Robert Brustein claims that Miller’s direction of Robert Lowell’s Old Glory transformed American theatre. “Alot of stage directors...know only about the theatre and not too much about anything else,” observed opera orchestra conductor Kent Nagano. “Jonathan knows about everything.” In addition to his knowledge and intelligence, Nagano adds, “That’s what he brings into his productions—a sense of everyday life.”

  Miller directed tragedy, and in every play he looked for the irony.Whether or not it is a tragic irony, in the 1980s Miller helped found the UK's Alzheimer's Society and was an  its president for many years, using his skills and presence to bring attention to the previously obscure disease.  In 2019 he himself succumbed to it.  His mother died relatively young of early onset Alzheimer's, but Jonathan Miller, who once said he would be satisfied with living 80 years, made it to 85. May he rest in peace.  His work lives on.

This Week's Column

Going Stoppard

Extending this week's review of Tom Stoppard's play, On the Razzle, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, with more musings on Tom Stoppard--in particular, his comedy...

Tom Stoppard is known for the content of his plays--the historical and political themes, the erudite riffs on aspects of science, philosophy, literature. Especially in the first half of his career, up until The Real Thing in 1982, he consciously pursued the goal of combining "a play of ideas with farce." He did so in big productions (Jumpers at the National Theatre, Travesties for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and both on Broadway) and in small (Dirty Linen at the Inter-Action's Almost Free Theatre, After Magritte for the Ambience Lunch Hour Theatre Club, and Dogg's Troupe Hamlet, which was first performed on the Fun Art Bus.)

Stoppard has also always been known as an innovator in structuring plays, and making the structure and the narrative dependent on each other. (This continues throughout his career.) All of this made his work very attractive to me from the moment Stoppard became known for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in the late 60s, when I was in college. I felt an immediate connection--to the Samuel Beckett rhythms of that play, to the academic philosophy in Jumpers (I'd studied analytic philosophy some in college) but most pervasively, to the 60s influences we had in common.

There are many other sources of his comedy. His debt to Oscar Wilde's epigrammatic wordplay is overt in several plays, especially Travesties, the plot of which involves a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. He was also not above a slightly more sophisticated form of rude and sexual humor, including sight gags (especially for instance in Dirty Linen) that have a long lineage but are most recently familiar from Vaudeville. At times Stoppard seemed to just about provide for all four Marx Brothers in the same play. He often uses a familiar comic device from Vaudeville and the movies, of verbal misunderstandings that wind up sounding like double talk. (Groucho and Chico's set piece dialogues were often based on this.) That style was lingering from the entry of many Vaudeville (or British Music Hall) stars into television (via radio and movies, too.)

As for later influences, in some of Stoppard's lines I hear an echo of Steve Allen, who emerged in the 50s as the first host of The Tonight Show in the 50s,and was at the height of his zany comedy in his late 60s late night show. For instance, in On the Razzle: "I worked for a tailor once. I cooked his goose for him. Everything went well until I got confused and goosed his cook." Steve Allen (to a 1990s audience aboard the now stationary Queen Mary, which by the way Stoppard sailed on when it was active): "I'm limping because of an old football injury. I tripped on an old football."

But for other 60s influences, particularly British, I saw a lot of evidence that my guesses are pretty good in Ira Bruce Nadel's biography of Stoppard, including one amazing long shot. For the influences (or at least echoes) I heard in his humor were the ones I cherished, especially those that came through America from England in the 60s. Moreover, the connections were often active: these people knew each other, saw each other's work and even idolized each other.

In reference to Douglas (Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Adams, I once traced a basic lineage back to Cambridge and Oxford in the 1950s, to Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, who burst on the American scene in the Kennedy 60s with their revolutionary revue on Broadway, Beyond the Fringe. This very English grouping of original comic skits had of course played in London earlier, and made them all stars.

There's also a particular influence on their comedy that flowed through to Monty Python and Douglas Adams of the Cambridge and Oxford ordinary language philosophers--Wittgenstein, Russell and in particular G.E. Moore, who was a towering figure at Cambridge for a half century. These and their disciplines dominated philosophy on both sides of the Atlantic for generations. We were studying it here in the 60s.

Their close analyses of language and logic was not only fodder for comedy (Beyond the Fringe has a gem satirizing Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore directly) but their attention to language revealed its comic potential in skewering all kinds of pretense. Though Stoppard did not attend university, he did spend time with students at Cambridge on an early production of Rosencrantz, and his feel for the Cambridge School of philosophy--the philosopher he satirized in Jumpers was named George Moore--may have partly come from this comedy lineage.

Stoppard's career intersected with the Beyond the Fringe quartet in a number of ways. One of his early journalism jobs writing about theatre in London was for a magazine co-owned by Peter Cook; as a playwright, Jonathan Miller was suggested to direct one of his plays, and to star in another. Alan Bennett was by then a fellow playwright whose work was said to be an influence on Stoppard's. They were all part of the same milieu, knowing many of the same people, and working with them in theatre and film.

But even before, the resemblance was palpable and remarked upon, as when a reviewer wrote that Stoppard's R& G Are Dead was the funniest parody of Shakespeare since a famous skit by Beyond the Fringe.

 There were others in the Oxbridge line who added to the new comedy atmosphere--David Frost and his remarkable That Was the Week That Was brought bracing, intelligent, witty and overt social and political satire to British (and later American) TV. ( It was a later Frost show, and one of the comedians on it named John Cleese, that inspired Douglas Adams to write in that comic vein. Cleese of course would become part of another Oxbridge-educated group, Monty Python.)

There was a more physical lineage of comedy in the late 50s and through the 60s, personified by Peter Sellers and fellow madcaps of the Goon Show. The physical and verbal wit were combined in, for example, the films of Richard Lester (including A Hard Day's Night, which gave the Beatles physical comedy and witty lines--and not just the already verbally witty John Lennon.)

 By the late 60s, such a combination was turning up in the most popular TV series in England, especially with children: Doctor Who. Douglas Adams wrote for a few of Tom Baker's best years as the fourth Doctor, and he brought John Cleese and Eleanor Bron (a fine stage actor who appeared in the Lester/Beatles' film Help! and the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore comedy, Bedazzled) in for a funny cameo. Another example would be the cult 60s/70s film, The Ruling Class, which starred Peter O'Toole--a particular friend of Tom Stoppard.

This was the atmosphere that Stoppard was breathing in the London of the 60s particularly, and afterwards as well. I cherish that era and all these figures, but there is one more group I would add as being part and parcel of the kind of humor they represent. Including them I thought was a little bit of a stretch, since they aren't English but American. Yet their highly sophisticated verbal humor, its political and social application, all at a breakneck pace, became a countercultural if not cultural phenomenon in California on the radio in the 1960s, and then nationally in the early 70s with their series of LPs. They were (and are) called the Firesign Theatre.

There's a stylistic, perhaps a inspirational connection, just as the Byrds and the Buffalo Springfield were inspired by the Beatles--and so, by the way, was Stoppard, who famously played pop songs when he wrote, including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; Stoppard was also known for his resemblance to Mick Jagger, which he reputedly enhanced with his 60s wardrobe. Inspiration from popular music and music figures is another common connection to many of the 60s/70s comic influences. This again evolved into personal connections and working relationships: the Pythons parodied and worked with members of the Beatles, and Stoppard himself eventually became friends with Jagger.

But beyond this sort of "something in the air", there was one tiny revelation in Nadel's biography, which clearly he didn't realize might lead anywhere: Tom Stoppard wrote his first version of Rosencrantz in 1964 while he was in Berlin for five months as part of a Ford Foundation project that brought together a small group of young theatre writers from the UK and the US. They all lived together, and each wrote for a project to be staged in Berlin with German theatre artists. Stoppard's was this early Rosencrantz. The kicker is that one of the two Americans was Peter Bergman, who returned to the US to become a founder and one of the four members of Firesign Theatre, creating topical comedy full of wordplay and wildness on stage but especially in a series of LPs that fans across America literally memorized.

Nadel apparently had no idea what Firesign Theatre was, but the sympathy of its comedic style with Stoppard's is apparent, at least to me. And now there is this tantalizing biographical connection.