A Farewell to "Soap Bubbles"

By William A. Henry Ill

Director Jonathan Miller quits the stage to return to medicine

It began as a two-week holiday job. Jonathan Miller, then a 26-year-old medical student, joined three fellow Oxbridge graduates in writing and performing a comic revue at the Edinburgh Festival. His collaborators were Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Their insouciant, schoolboy-clever show became the London and Broadway hit Beyond the Fringe, and Miller's two-week lark turned into a celebrated 22-year career in the theater, primarily as a director.

Urbane yet intense, scholarly yet venturesome, Miller has controversially reworked the classics of theater and opera on stages from Britain's National Theater to the Opera Theater of St. Louis. Among his six productions in the past year alone are a Rigoletto for the English National Opera, conceived as a Mafia saga, and a Hamlet in London rendered as Grand Guignol farce. He has also made films and TV shows, notably for BBC and PBS, including half a dozen feverish but authentic renditions of Shakespeare.

Those achievements would gratify most theater people. Miller, however, looks back and pronounces his existence weary, stale, flat and, above all, unprofitable. He says he is "tired of traveling, traveling, traveling, just to make a living." He waves off the idea of settling in to run a large resident theater: "If I had the worries that Trevor Nunn does at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I would absolutely open my veins in the bath." He resents the very existence of critics: "Twenty years of being reconstituted in newsprint has worn me out." With extravagantly pouty self-mockery, he sums up: "My life has consisted of asking people to dress up in other people's costumes and pretend they are somebody else."

Miller's exhaustion may sound like the fretfulness of a man in need of an extended vacation, but at the age of 48 his mid-life crisis has led to more than a sabbatical. This week, after more than two decades away from medicine, he is returning to research in clinical psychology, as a fellow at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. His goal, he explains, is to create something of permanence. Says he: "I am tired of making a soap bubble, watching it shine with iridescence, then having it explode while I am left with a soapy scum to say plaintively, 'You should have been here a moment ago: it was so nice.' "

The soap bubble that Miller vows will be his last is his current production of The School for Scandal at Harvard's American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. Richard Brinsley Sheridan's sour 1777 comedy about the fragility of reputation provides an apt farewell for a man who complains of subjecting his most intimate labors to the casual scrutiny of others. Says Miller: "It is about the extent to which we exist only by being invented, torn down and reinvented by other people."

Although the production is his last and the plot centers on two middle-aged men (ably played by Veterans Alvin Epstein and Jerome Kilty) who achieve contentment by altering their ways of life, Miller has not imposed his discontents on Sheridan's text. Nonetheless, this School for Scandal is characteristic Miller: messy, but ablaze with energy, intelligence and anger. The acting is a stylistic melange, in part because Miller opted for "rounded characters at the center and one-trait caricatures on the periphery." Visually, the production fulfills Miller's goal of "allowing audiences to visit the unvisitable past." The sparely decorated sets, the costumes and even the faces of the ensemble owe much to Hogarth's etchings of the middle class of the 18th century. The most spectacular effect, of hellishly intense candlelight in the umbrous quarters occupied by the dissolute Charles Surface, derives both from Miller's study of light in 18th century paintings and from his stagecraft: to make a yellow glow appear to emanate from candles rather than overhead, Miller scooped out a jug on a table and filled it with a powerful lamp. In all, Miller's mastery is evident, and it is hard to view the happy ending without feeling a concomitant pang of loss at his pledge to depart.

For a man less diversely gifted or assertively confident, Miller's return to scientific research so late in life might seem quixotic. But like the 19th century polymaths whom he ardently admires--the man he would most want to have been is Charles Darwin--Miller has remained a broad-ranging and shrewd student of the ideas of others. His series for the BBC and PBS on physiology, The Body in Question, and on psychology, States of Mind (not yet seen in the U.S.) have both yielded stimulating books. Miller says he is eager to explore "memory and imagery, subjects so close to philosophy that they were considered illicit two decades ago. Psychology has now shifted from questions about chemical and physiological hardware to questions about software and the process of knowing."

Miller's dual affiliation with science and literature stems from his parents, Child Psychiatrist Emanuel Miller and Biographer Betty Miller. Throughout his turbulent years in the theater, Miller says, he has longed for a settled, contemplative existence like theirs, one in which he could spend more time with his wife of 27 years, Rachel, a family doctor, and their three children, Tom, 20, William, 19, and Kate, 16. Like his hero Darwin, he wants "to look back in tranquillity on a vast voyage, forgotten and then slowly recalled, that leads to a grand theory." The creative process involved in forgetting and remembering preoccupied Miller during School for Scandal. He explains: "In rehearsal one of the actors missed his lines, providing instead a precise paraphrase of what Sheridan wrote. I found I was more interested in how his mind translated the speeches than in the words he was supposed to be saying, and it was like a lightning flash: I realized how ready I was to go."

Skeptical friends believe that Miller will soon return to the theater, but he insists he is through with the stage for this lifetime. As for the next, he admits, "I imagine coming before God to justify myself, and I know where he will send me: not to heaven but back to the theater."

--By William A. Henry Ill This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.