Jonathan Miller has a highly mobile face. It's the face of a natural performer, someone whose features not only register but underscore his thoughts (and Miller thinks many thoughts). His most frequent expression might best be described as quizzicality verging on
wonderment.
One expects that was the look on Miller's face more than six decades ago when he came across an illustration of the brain in his psychiatrist father's copy of Gray's Anatomy. Only six, Miller sensed something was missing. "Where's the mind?" he asked his father.
The question was precocious -- and prescient. Few people have spent a career (or, in Miller's case, careers) demonstrating just how vital a human mind can be.
Miller, 69, was in Boston recently to give a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts on reflection and mirrors in art. It concluded the inaugural season of the museum's Ruth and Carl Shapiro Lecture Series. The lecturers preceding Miller were Chuck Close and Mark Morris.
Close is a painter, of course, and Morris is a choreographer. How, though, to characterize Miller? "Under `occupation' on my tax form, it says `theater director,'" Miller says with an amused shrug while having coffee at the Park Plaza. "It's simpler than `amateur
epistemologist.'"
"He's a universal man, a Renaissance man," says a longtime friend, Robert Brustein, the founding director of the American Repertory Theatre. "He's a remarkable human being, a remarkable artist."
Based in London, Miller has for decades been one of the world's foremost directors of theater and opera. In the early 1980s, he oversaw the BBC's filming of the complete plays of Shakespeare. His Mafia version of Rigoletto moved Verdi's opera to 1950s Little Italy. He set The Mikado in a 1920s British seaside hotel, and his version of The Merchant of Venice (starring Laurence Olivier) turned Shylock into a 19th-century businessman.
Most recently, Miller directed King Lear, starring Christopher Plummer, in New York and a version of Donizetti's opera L'Elisir d'Amore in Stockholm that drew on Wim Wenders' film Paris, Texas and the paintings of Edward Hopper.
His resume notwithstanding, Miller professes to be a theatrical amateur. "I don't think of myself as being a theater director," he says. "I think of myself as being all these other things I'm interested in which converge extremely profitably on the theater. I'm interested in perception, philosophy, psychology, cognition, anthropology, and so forth. If you start working in the theater as an amateur, you become professionally very adept because these things are so relevant."
Miller started out as a medical doctor, albeit one who'd dabbled in light theatricals as an undergraduate at Cambridge University. That led to his involvement as writer and performer in the legendary stage revue Beyond the Fringe, which made him a star in the early 1960s. He has contemplated returning to medicine at various times since and has continued doing work in cognitive science (his medical field was neuropsychology).
"I met Jonathan back in 1981 or 1982," says Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. "Ever since I've known him, he has always been at or close to the cutting edge of research on the mind, even though he hasn't been `officially' a cognitive scientist for quite a few years."
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