As he likes it

There are no absolutes in interpretation, at least not for director Jonathan Miller, whose innovative approach to theatre and opera has always been more European than British. A chance discovery of a previously hidden nuance or gesture in a line of text can present an entirely new set of possibilities. And that is the way he likes it.

Texts many be cut or interpretation changed, but meaning the same. A natural intellectual with a powerful visual sense, he is most at home in the world of the mind; he was born into it. "My father was a psychiatrist. He studied philosophy at Cambridge under Bertrand Russell. My mother was a writer, so the house was always full of interesting people and interesting talk." Ideas excite him.

Mysteries less so. "Problems are far more interesting. They are there to be solved. Mysteries aren't, so why try?" Miller thinks very quickly, and although he speaks at a fair pace, unlike many clever people his delivery is ordered and logical, emphatic without being dogmatic. His theatre has always been more about ideas than illusions. "Illusions are tricks, they're trivial." His range is impressively diverse, from Mozart to Darwin, from Chomsky to The Simpsons. Invariably, references tend to be drawn more from science than literature or art. But then Miller, who has directed more than 60 operatic productions and early into his career became established as an exciting director of Shakespeare, is by training a doctor.

Neurology remains a passion, as do all aspects of the philosophy of the mind. Within moments, he is off on an exciting journey of semiotics and anthropology, discussing French anthropologist Mannoni's book on the revolt in Madagascar which saw Caliban and Ariel in The Tempest as different forms of the black response to white paternalism. "Caliban was the demoralised, dispossessed, shuffling field worker, and Ariel is deft, accomplished and absorbs the skills and techniques of the white master."

In Dublin to direct Shakespeare's As You Like It, which opens next week at the Gate Theatre, Miller sees the play as a sophisticated comedy concerned with what happens when a group of people are taken out of their world and enter a forest where they are presented with a new set of possibilities. Often the best way of understanding the world you are in is by going into an alternative one. "Like the way gardeners bend over and look between their legs to get a view of the garden."

This evening, he delivers a lecture at the National Gallery based on his book, On Reflection (1998), written to accompany an exhibition he selected for the National Gallery in London, in which he explores the difference between a reflection and its reality, as well as the various qualities of reflection as represented in art, from the diffuse sheen of burnished copper, to the realism of silvered glass. It is a study of ambiguity, distortion and psychological processes. As ever with Miller, art and science walk hand in hand throughout the text.

Last October, another book, Nowhere in Particular, was published. It features random photographs taken by him over the years, images which caught his eye: a doorway, a torn poster. In it Miller discusses how we see and what we see. It is the same with his theatre.

What do we see and why? The search for the real has encouraged him to use overlay in his productions. In real life we often speak at the same time, speech overlaps. Drawn to productions which catch a sense of life, he agrees American writers such as Mamet mastered this long ago. Central to Miller's interest in theatre is his obsession with human behaviour.

"I'm fascinated by what makes people tick. Why we do the things we do, why we say the things we do. I love watching people." More than one person over the years must have asked him why, considering his subsequent career in theatre, he chose medicine over an arts degree. Miller's response has an element of weary resignation. "From the age of 15 I've been interested in the human brain, but when I was young the only way of learning about it was by seeing what happened to damaged ones. For a long time before the psychological dimension was recognised, mental disorders were treated as diseases of the brain."

His main ambition in any production is making sure the actors sound real. "Do they sound like people speaking? Are they conversing? Is it real? I don't want recitation." His rehearsal process has always been based upon conversation, "the hard work is a consequence of the conversations we have had".

There is a pattern. Every production seems to begin awkwardly, "with the play, the text seeming flat, and it's a question of `what can we do with this thing to make it live?' Then something happens and it begins to come together." Last week he was a man with problems, this week he has solved most of them and is becoming excited by "what's coming together".

Actors and singers enjoy working with Miller. Of the latter he praises their handling of "this very delicate instrument" (the voice). Of course he is aware there are critics who refuse to forget the fact that he can't read music, but as he says: "I listen to it, I don't claim to be an expert but any opera I have directed, I know the music, I know what it means." There have been many fine productions. His most recent, his fifth of The Marriage of Figaro, at the Royal Opera House did very well - and he knows it. Anyone doubting Miller's feel for music should investigate his astonishing dramatised production of Bach's St Matthew Passion.

Staged in a London church in 1994, and broadcast on BBC, it is brilliantly devised and well shot. Miller creates an extraordinary intimacy as the singers engage with the story and communicate with the musicians. Soloists approach the individual musicians. Fear, anger, bewilderment, sorrow and joy are conveyed through various mood shifts without any props or costumes. The chorus performs in small groups rather than in a formal choir setting. Miller is proud of it, but stresses: "it wasn't my idea. I was asked to do it." It travels to New York next year.

His versatility and boundless cleverness, however, have exasperated some critics and rivals. Miller knows he is a thorn in certain people's sides, and says matter of factly: "I'm always being attacked. There are some people, quite a lot, who hate everything I do, and think, `He's only a comedian'."

Jonathan Miller could not be accused of shrouding his art in mystique. But nor he is a campaigning popularist. He is practical, blunt, intellectually sure of himself ("I've never really seen the point of Beckett; I'm not a fan") without being overpowering, and is very funny. Unlike many directors, he does not claim that all plays are masterpieces. Playing with time-scale is permissable. "If one is dealing with a play written in the distant past and one is somewhere in the distant future, how is one to know the time the playwright knew? He's not there to ask."

The nowhere and the no-here appear to suit him as a director; after all, the ideas matter more than details which one can't hope to get right. "Given that Shakespeare left no collateral instructions, it is hard to imagine how one could ever know that one was in the presence of a version wherein the text was speaking for itself. How would the characters speak in such a performance? What accents would they use . . . how would the cast stand, and what would they all be dressed in? What does a fairy look like, and in what way do his utterances differ from those of ordinary mortals? Even if the author were alive to tell us, it seems doubtful whether he would be able to give a satisfactory answer to all these questions . . . The mystery of Shakespeare's genius lies in the fact that innumerable performances of his plays can be rendered, few of which are closely compatible with one another." For Miller success may be gauged "by the extent to which the text now speaks with more or less coherent vitality".

Miller is a good mimic and has not forgotten that he was once part of the Footlights Revue team which led him to Beyond The Fringe, which he co-wrote and appeared in with the late Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and playwright Alan Bennett. "I was never a member of Footlights. I wasn't interested."

As a student Miller had been invited to join the Apostles, the college's secret forum for intellectuals, and which once boasted disgraced spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess as members. Was Miller a good performer? "I was a good comic revue actor, I have good timing and `I know what's was funny'." Humour has remained important to him. It is an important element of his work. Genius is a word he doesn't trust, yet he says: "If it means anything, I think `genius' could be applied to Peter Cook and also to Spike Milligan - the Goon Shows are wonderful."

His own humour is pacy and inclined towards one-liners. How much of this is due to his being Jewish? It is obvious that Miller could hold his own in any high-speed gathering of members of the New York arts fraternity. A foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he says he does feel at ease in the US, but stresses that he has never felt particularly Jewish. He certainly does not wear it as a badge and has never romanticised his Jewish roots (his grandparents came from Lithuania), but then nor does he seem overly English. Miller is quite neutral and in fact looks more like someone to be found browsing in a bookstore in Vermont than in London. A tall, rangy, dog-eyed character, with a worried, if good naturedly mournful expression, he has a great face and announces it has been recently added to the National Portrait Gallery in London.

"I was painted by Patrick Conroy, a Glaswegian artist." It's difficult to imagine Miller sitting for a portrait, but he did, "for a week". Asked if he had a choice would he have liked to have lived in Mozart's Vienna or in the 1920s Berlin of Otto Dix, he smiles at the notion of either and seems drawn to Dix's Berlin but points out that the difficulty of time travelling back into the past is having the hindsight of knowing what would happen. Who would he have liked to have met. "Darwin, T.E. Huxley, Aleksandr Herzen, though not Tolstoy, certainly not Dostoyevsky - he was mad - but Turgenev - he was a civilised European. And Flaubert, yes."

Sentimentality is a quality he deplores and refers to it several times as the basic flaw of one work or other. When asked if he is an emotional man, he says: "I become emotional when presented with appalling acts of cruelty. I am incapable of seeing any image from the first World War without being distressed at the thought of these bright, innocent young men looking up from a trench and being instantly killed." He refers to the fact that 250 million of us "have killed each other".

In 1963 he was the film and television critic for the New Yorker. Describing it as a secret society where everyone lived in their own office, he recalls writing about the television coverage of the Kennedy assassination and agrees he wrote it in the role of observer rather than mourner. "It was so repetitive. Jack Ruby's shooting of Oswald must have been screened about 40 times over one weekend." Miller's opinion of contemporary journalism is not too high. "It's all so lazy and illiterate. Anything about me always appears under the headline `Renaissance Man'. There's no such thing; it means `Jack of all trades, master of none'. Or `The Doctor's Dilemma' or `Miller's Tale' . . . can't anyone think of anything else?"

On returning to England in 1964, having already directed poet Robert Lowell's Old Glory trilogy, he was offered the editorship of a new arts programme, Monitor. England was not ready for the ideas he had been absorbing in the New York of Andy Warhol and Susan Sontang. It was even less ready for his radical treatment of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, "without the animal masks". His next major project took him to an audience far wider than those with an interest in the arts. The Body in Question was a 13-part television series, written and presented by Miller. In it he explored the notion of illness and the various stages which led to the decision to become a patient. The programme won a popular following and the book of the series was a best-seller. Around this time, he also began directing seven of 12 Shakespeare plays - all of which he produced - for the BBC. His only complaint was that "they insisted on costumes. Otherwise the Americans wouldn't buy them."

Miller's lamentations somehow sound more like fact than complaints. Even so, he has achieved many things through a diversity of projects, many of which he has been invited to do, so someone must have faith in him. He shrugs. But is he not pleased that he has rarely had to compromise himself? After all, having to stage the BBC Shakespeare in costume was not that crippling a limitation.

Reluctantly he semi-agrees and looks sufficiently hurt to render all but the heartless guilty. He is not rich. The trendy new luvvies of the arts scene are wealthier. Miller still lives in the Camden Town he grew up in, and has remained in the same house throughout his married life. His wife, Rachel, also a doctor, has now retired and is concentrating on playing the cello. They have three children and two grandchildren. "We don't live extravagantly; we have one house. We don't need a lot of money." Miller is not a theatre-goer, but he does go to concerts.

"I'm out of fashion now. Theatre in England is run by people in their 30s. I'm almost 70 . . . I'm old, not senile, but old. I get a shock when I see pictures of my younger self. Was I that young? I used to be regarded as some kind of dangerous vandal. Now I'm a boring fossil," he says with mild irony. "It's rather interesting the way I seem to have gone from one extreme to the other without having any kind of middle phase." Precisely because he is an affable character, one expects him to say that he doesn't mind this.

Instead, he says: "Of course I mind it. I am bitter about it. I don't think it's fair." However, he quickly puts his reply into context. "The arts shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's only an interesting, amusing way of passing the time. It gives us something interesting to talk about. But it's not a matter of life or death, just great fun."

Shakespeare's As You Like It, directed by Jonathan Miller opens at the Gate Theatre on February 15thP}