In 1991, British author, television producer, and theater director Jonathan Miller made his Metropolitan Opera directing debut with a dramatically compelling production of Katya Kabanova, Leos Janácek’s musical drama about a dysfunctional family. Despite highly favorable reviews, ticket sales were only 60 percent of capacity. "I feel rather desperate about that," Miller said recently, "considering that an absolutely execrable production of La Traviata {by the extravagant opera producer Franco Zefferelli} played to packed houses who invariably applauded as the curtain went up." Desperate or not, Miller (who read natural sciences at Cambridge and was certified to practice medicine in 1959) continues to bring his keen observations of the human condition to the opera, theater, and lecture stage, and to publish books on such topics as the nature of visual perception and the difference between mental and pictorial images. His vision of the arts, and the theater in particular, is firmly rooted in a belief in the power of unflinching observation of reality. "I’m hung up on the actual," he says. "I think that theater has to be a Gesamtkunstwerk–it has to be integrated into real life. Otherwise, it’s not worth leaving neurology for."

This spring, Miller came to campus to present the Institute’s eighth James Michelin Distinguished Visitor Lecture. The series was established in 1992 by New York designer Bonnie Cashin "to foster creative interaction between the arts and sciences." Shortly before his campus appearance, in a phone conversation from his home in London, Miller shared some of his views on science, art, and their creative interaction, or lack thereof. Miller was interviewed by Caltech News writer Marcy Drexler.

Back in 1982, you described your life to a reporter as "an endless rhapsody of self-doubt." Why?

What I should have been, you see, is a neurologist. I was trained as a neurologist, and then I went into the theater, and if you’re brought up to think of yourself as a biological scientist of some sort, pretty well everything else seems frivolous by comparison. Now, this is a sort of silly thing, but nevertheless you can’t get rid of it. You spend ten years of your life being trained to do one thing, and you’re being taught to think that it’s the most serious thing that anyone could possibly do, and then suddenly you find yourself doing something that in some respects is the epitome of frivolity.

But obviously you can’t say that directing Shakespeare is a frivolity, unless you think that Shakespeare is frivolous.

It’s not that Shakespeare is frivolous, but you spend your time just getting people to dress up in other people’s costumes and pretending to be people that they’re not, and you think, after the years go by, well, what on earth was all that about?

Surely you’ve had the experience yourself of being in the audience and being tremendously moved by a performance.

Well, I have, of course. There’s one level at which I know it’s a perfectly legitimate enterprise. But here I am coming to Caltech, which is a place that has got a very impressive reputation for major, permanent contributions to the body of human knowledge, and then you think, well, you’ve done a production of Twelfth Night or Hamlet or whatever, and then, three years later there will already have been twenty more.

But, as you know, in the theater each production is unique.

It is, but not much survives. Productions disappear, whereas if you publish a paper on quantum mechanics, or on the physiology of the red-cell nucleus, it’s there.

Many of your projects–I’m thinking of The Body in Question television series you made for the BBC, and your recent book and museum show, On Reflection, about the physiology of visual perception–touch on science.

They’re all connected with it in some way, even the theater work. I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist. You look at gait and posture and language and expression and so forth, and that’s what you’re looking at all the time when you’re looking at brain-damaged patients, so that if you are looking at people or trying to persuade people to pretend to be other people convincingly, it draws your attention to what the real behavior is like. So in that sense I feel it’s neurology carried on by other methods.

What do you see as the connection between art and science? Is there a role for art in the professional life of the scientist?

I don’t think there’s any particular reason for encouraging that idea. As we know from the work of certain fundamental physicists, people like Einstein were very dependent upon conjuring up visual images in order to imagine things which otherwise were not easily formulated. But I don’t think that the visual arts, or any art, have much to do with science. Science is a self-sufficient activity. I think the passion for bringing the two together arises from the fact that there is some sort of anxiety about scientists being dehumanized or not having some sort of engagement with the ethical or the moral or whatever, but you can’t change that by giving, as it were, prophylactic doses of Thomas Mann. Scientists either have an interest or they don’t. A lot of high-level scientists are in fact people of almost universal interest. Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

But don’t you think an interest in and appreciation for art can be cultivated as part of an undergraduate education?

I’m not certain that it does much good. People are already self-selected by the time they’ve decided to become scientists. They are people often with a very mathematical, technical view of things. I seriously doubt that you can somehow give these sorts of subcutaneous injections of art. People are either interested in it or they’re not, and I think when they do get these courses in school, they find them rather burdensome and an obstacle to getting on with science. Don’t forget that at least half of the people who take the arts don’t like them anyway. They do it as a routine. They can answer the questions and get good results on exams, but then you talk to them and you realize that they have a very automated view of these things. For many people, the arts are little more than a fashionable costume jewelry, which they ornament themselves with in order to give an impressive look of being civilized and successful.

Your estimation of the arts audience’s sincerity is pretty low.

I know from many years of watching audiences in expensive opera houses that a very large proportion of the people are there because it’s somehow the "done" thing–it carries a great deal of social prestige. If it were really an interest in art, you would find just as large audiences attending performances of Schiller’s Don Carlos or Mary Stuart as you do at Carmen or La Traviata, but you don’t. What people want is not what some would call imaginative and often austere productions but very lavish productions which cast back into the auditorium an image of their affluence. I don’t mind people wanting to see Carmen, La Traviata, and La Boheme. I do most of those operas most of the time, but I think there are ways of doing them that actually draw your attention to what they’re about, which is human relationships. If they’re about furnishings and fabric, you’re having your attention distracted, and then it’s a spectacle with a sort of musical soundtrack, and I think that’s deplorable. The great operas, and I’m thinking of the great musical dramas, draw your attention to what it’s like to be human.

How do you feel about your own place in the theatrical world? You have been quoted as saying you felt stuck between the twin idiocies of unquestioning traditionalism and of unquestioning modernism.

When I started out, the only thing I was fighting against was a sort of fatuous traditionalism–but as time’s gone on, the opera and the theater have been infected by the same sort of lunatic relativism which has overtaken vast areas of the academy. I spend most of my time trying to find some sort of idiom that is independent of both. The thing about science is that it’s an accurate picture of the world. Most of the relativists that go gabbing on so fatuously about the fact that everything is relative to certain political and social interests are perfectly happy to get onto airplanes in the knowledge that they’re going to work.

So are you sorry you left science?

No, I’ve had what people would rather glibly call "a rich, full life." Nevertheless, I will always be remorseful about that, yes. It’s just simply that I feel I owed myself some sort of achievement in an area that I felt was unquestionably valuable. When you look at the theory of monoclonal antibodies, you know it’s right.

Whereas, when you look at one of your opera or stage productions, you’re not sure?

It’s right at that moment, it’s okay, it’s fine, it illuminates. The most interesting response I get, the one that pleases me most, is when people say, "I hadn’t thought of it that way." Now, that is in a way also what scientists are trying to do–they’re trying to get people to see that the world can be represented in an alternative way and that it’s right.
And if you do a good production, you know that it has actually cast a revealing light on an aspect of human affairs, showing something right about it where previously it was wrong, generalized, and sentimental perhaps.

Speaking of illuminating human affairs, what do you think about the current resurgence of interest in Shakespeare?

Do you think there is one?

There are a lot of movies of the period out or coming out, and Shakespeare in Love has certainly attracted plenty of attention.

Well, that’s not about Shakespeare, it’s about some sort of fictional creature. It uses the name Shakespeare, but it’s not about Shakespeare. It’s not about anything, really. It has
the allure of costume drama with a famous name in it.

Who doesn’t demand royalties . . .

Doesn’t get them, poor thing. But it also relieves the audience of the necessity of reading Shakespeare. They feel they’re acquainted with him without having to read him. I would much prefer they looked at Shakespeare done on a bare stage, you see. What I object to with Shakespeare in Love is this idea that the past is a furnishings store. And I think that the only thing that is interesting about the past is exactly what L. P. Hartley said about it: "The past is a foreign country in which they do things differently." And what we read fiction for is first of all to see some sort of commonality between them and us but also to get this rather weird sense that here are members of the same species who acted and behaved and expected so differently from us. But there’s no point in doing it if you are just simply beguiled by beautiful appearances and backlight and nice chiffon dresses. That’s vulgarity. That’s another reason why I have these self-doubts. I wonder, is this a business I really ought to be in?

But you manage to keep on.

I keep my end up.