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‘Nothing easy can ever really be satisfying’
Theatre director’s message for youth
FOR a man whose satire helped to end the era of deference, Jonathan Miller is strangely nostalgic for the post-war years and an age when we all “knew how to behave”.
“People now have lost that conception of shared space, of how to behave in public,” he said at an “audience” given at the Regent’s College private university in Regent’s Park on Thursday. He recalled the sense of shared values that characterised British life when rationing and the war effort were still fresh in the popular memory.
With all of his 74 years lived within a mile of Regent’s Park – he was born in Park Crescent, spent his youth in St John’s Wood, and has lived in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, for 50 years – Mr Miller can chart what he sees as a decline in public attitudes to cleanliness from a fixed point.
“As I am always telling the Camden New Journal,” he said, before condemning the thoughtlessness with which visitors to Camden Town discard their detritus in the areas of its terraces.
He is, strictly speaking, both “Dr” and “Sir” Jonathan Miller. But he does not use the second honorific, while the first, to his regret, is of fading relevance.
He recently decided to stop his subscription to the General Medical Council, meaning that he is now a doctor by courtesy only – “I cannot justify it any longer,” he announced on Thursday.
Although Mr Miller’s religious identity is clear – asked “do you believe in God?” the distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association laughed aloud – he has no interest in race.
“I am a Jew only to anti-semites,” he said. “I take no interest in my ethnic roots whatsoever.”
Mr Miller, who famously loathes the epithet “polymath”, nonetheless hesitates when asked how to describe what he does for a living.
“What’s written on your passport?” asked an audience member as he became uncharacteristically tongue-tied.
“I think it says theatre director,” said Mr Millar. “Yes. I am a theatre director.”
And indeed he had come from working earlier that day on the revival of his Barber of Seville, now playing at the Coliseum. But though he was knighted for his contribution to the arts, he describes his involvement in theatre generally as a “disastrous accident”, the result of the extraordinary success of Beyond The Fringe.
That collaboration with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennet first took him away from his path as a neurologist. While he is at pains to emphasise how his understanding of the human brain has always informed both his comedy and his theatre direction, it is to his missed career in medicine that he repeatedly returns.
“Theatre direction has always been easy to me,” said Mr Millar. “Nothing that is easy is really satisfying. That is what they should teach in school.”
Jonathan Miller |
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