Jonathan Miller: I am not one of the bullying tyrants

The incomparable Jonathan Miller talks to Laura Davis about directing the latest Northern Broadside's play to visit the Liverpool Playhouse

Liverpool Daily Post, May 16, 2013: archived on Nexus

Is Sir Jonathan Miller extremely modest or does he find most tasks a doddle? The self-effacing way he talks about his own contribution to Northern Broadside's latest production suggests the company could have saved itself his director's paycheck.

But then perhaps everything seems simple to a man considered to be among Britain's most intelligent (cleverer even than super-brain Stephen Fry, it has been suggested); to a medic-turned opera director, actor, artist, sculptor, photographer, TV presenter and writer.

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Maybe he's toying with quantum physics in the recesses of his mind while answering my questions.

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Miller, now 78, has been a multitasker since before the expression was coined.

A stalwart of the Cambridge Footlights while studying natural sciences and medicine at St John's College, he began appearing in TV and radio shows such as Sunday Night at the London Palladium before qualifying as a doctor in 1959.

He was still working in the medical profession in 1970, when his production of The Merchant of Venice, starring Sir Laurence Olivier, opened on the West End stage.

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He spent the early part of the following decade as a hospital house officer, then directed operas for Glyndebourne and English National Opera.

Miller followed up his 1983 BBC TV documentary series States of Mind by studying neuropsychology at a Canadian University and becoming a neuropsychology research fellow at Sussex University.

So I'm pretty certain he only has to divert one or two of his little grey cells to our conversation.

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"I don't go into a rehearsal room with things in my mind," he says.

"It's perfectly self-evident to anyone who can read without moving their lips what the play's about.

"We talk a little bit about it but I don't, like some of my fellow directors, give hour-long talks before.

"An awful lot of directors are bullying tyrants and they like to introduce their concepts but anything that's any good comes from the actors themselves."

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Miller is full of praise for his cast, which brings to life Githa Sowerby's dysfunctional family on the brink of disruption.

Northern Broadside's artistic director Barry Rutter, last seen at the Liverpool Playhouse in A Government Inspector, is John Rutherford Snr - a domineering industrialist who has pulled himself into the middle classes through a vigorous work ethic and determination to survive.

His sons - a preacher and a dreamer - are reluctant to take over the company and he is blind to his daughter's steady capabilities.

His unappreciative offspring, as he sees them, are risking the social mobility he has worked so hard to achieve for them.

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"It is a piece of dramatic immediacy that is not that different from Chekhov," says Miller.

"It's absolutely natural. There's no temptation to impose some sort of ghastly conceptualism on it, it just is what it is. It's a very straightforward account of a dysfunctional family."

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The play was published in 1912 and, after its initial showing, it wasn't revived until the mid-90s.

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"I don't know why," muses Miller.

"It's perhaps because it's so straightforward and normal. People want something spectacular and colourful and so forth and that is never what interests me.

"I like things that draw your attention to what you perhaps have overlooked previously, which is simply what it's like to be alive."

At the time of Sowerby's writing, Rutherford and Son was seen by some as an attack on patriarchal society.

The character with the greatest instinct for survival, the only one who is able to turn Rutherford's arrogance to her own advantage, it turns out, is a woman.

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"Without self-consciously regarding itself as a feminist work it has got themes of quite recognisable feminism," says Miller.

Mired by recession, Rutherford's world was dealing with many of the same social problems that we are struggling with today.

"It's absolutely not a historical piece," says Miller, comparing the situation in 1912 to the present day.

"This rather ridiculous government, which talks with promiscuous inappropriateness about a Big Society, are completely unaware of the fact that so many people have no chance whatever. They are the Bulls--tingdon Club," he adds, punning on the name of Oxford University's exclusive society The Bullingdon Club.

"They have always been completely separate from other people below what they regard as their social level. It's the best name for them."