Jonathan Miller blasts West End — and he’s wrong
Jonathan Miller is a genius and one of the most interesting stage directors of our day. But he’s completely off beam in his latest outburst, born of a fit of pique over star names in Hamlet at the RSC and the Donmar while his own modestly cast Hamlet for the Tobacco Factory in Bristol can’t find a West End home.
Like everyone else who missed it, I regret not seeing Jamie Ballard as the melancholy Dane in Bristol. But I’m certainly looking forward to seeing both David Tennant and Jude Law in the role in the West End, even though both are far too old for it (that might have been a more rewarding line of attack for Miller).
Sure, the West End is “obsessed with celebrity” in Miller’s phrase; the West End always has been, and producers need to make money, and actually Miller is the first to complain about the type of audiences the West End attracts anyway.
Does he have no residual pride in what he has achieved for the Tobacco Factory? Isn’t that good enough for him? The respect of his peers and the appreciation of an engaged local audience. Or is he, too, in it just for the money?
And it’s frankly insulting to tar Tennant and Law with the brush of “the merely famous.” Tennant, he says snobbishly is “that man from Doctor Who.” If he’d seen Tennant’s Berowne for the RSC, or his brilliant Jimmy Porter, he’d know what a fantastic Hamlet he’ll probably make.
And of Law he says loftily, and ignorantly, “I suspect he can’t act better than the young unknown who played him [Hamlet]for me who was quite extraordinary.”
Suspect, Sir Jonathan? If you’d seen Law on stage at the National and the Young Vic over the past ten years in Jean Cocteau, Greek tragedy and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, you’d know he was more than well qualified to play Hamlet.
Shame on you! I’m sure there may well be producers who’d like to present the Bristol Hamlet if they could raise the money. But you could no more raise the money on Ballard’s name now than you could ten years ago, despite Miller’s assertion that you could. You might raise it on Miller’s name, but audiences frankly don’t want to “see” a director; they want to see actors.
The other recent production of Miller’s that London missed out on was last year’s The Cherry Orchard at the Sheffield Crucible. But when Joanna Lumley, the “absolutely fabulous” Madame Ranevskaya pulled out of the London transfer, so did the producers.
But why did Miller cast Lumley in the first place? He’d be the first to say that he did so not just because she was a big box office name, but because she was and is a very fine performer. Same goes for Tennant and Law.
As a student, I was involved in the founding of the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company for which Jonathan did his first Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Shakespeare in Love director John Madden was Sebastian, Hugh Thomas was Malvolio, Independent foreign correspondent Donald McIntyre was a bad-tempered Feste, director Alan Strachan a beaky Fabian.
It was brilliant, and he went off to do King Lear at the Nottingham Playhouse with Michael Hordern and Frank Middlemass as a similarly aged double act of Lear and Fool. He returned to the OCSC to do his first Hamlet (Hugh Thomas again) before joining Olivier’s National Theatre.
That first Hamlet, incidentally, carried a programme note by the venerable J C Trewin mostly devoted to the exciting nature of the opening scene, the most exciting opening scene in the history of world drama, he said; a scene that was cut in the production!
Also in that Hamlet was Andrew Hilton as the Ghost, a role he has now repeated at the Tobacco Factory of which he is the artistic director. “This is the best and most thrilling production of this great play I’ve seen in years,” said John Peter in the Sunday Times.
No wonder all involved thought they might have a chance of a West End showcase. But,then, you should hear what Jonathan Miller has to say about critics, and how little they know about anything!