Subsequent Performances

by Jonathan Miller

A director's brilliant inquiry into the problems--and solutions--of staging, filming, and acting classics for modern audiences. 90 black-and-white and color illustrations.

Genres: Theatre, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was a British theatre and opera director, author, television presenter, humorist and sculptor. Trained as a physician in the late 1950s, he first came to prominence in the 1960s with his role in the comedy review Beyond the Fringe with fellow writers and performers Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. Despite having seen few operas and not knowing how to read music, he began stage-directing them in the 1970s and became one of the world's leading opera directors with several classic productions to his credit. His best-known production is probably his 1982 "Mafia"-styled Rigoletto set in 1950s Little Italy, Manhattan. He was also a well-known television personality and familiar public intellectual in the UK and US.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan Miller is my hero. What a true polymath: director, scholar, expert in art and music ... and a medial doctor specializing in neurology, to boot. He beings it all to bear here, skillfully laying out the interpretative process for staging classics. This is one of the most inspiring and energizing books I've read, and I have no idea why it took me so long to do it.

[Len · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Miller was always someone I admired for his sophisticated, even arrogant, intellectualism. In this book, stitched together from a variety of lectures and writings, he pours forth his theatrical and operatic directorial wisdom. I'm a little older now and scepticism is not unknown among my few attributes.

There is much in Miller's views on the theatre that comes across as a self-perceived intellectual superiority – particularly over actors. At times he almost appears as a Scooby Doo villain bewailing that victory would have been certain if it hadn't been for those pesky players. He recounts his little victory over Laurence Olivier, who was playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: he persuaded Olivier not to wear one of the false noses he was famous for. And there was John Cleese as Petruchio in the BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew. For all Miller's learned and enlightened theories on presenting the play, it was Cleese wearing a large stiff feather in his hat and performing a standard comic routine with his fellow actors, who had to dodge and weave to avoid being hit as he kept turning round – a routine normally played with someone carrying a plank or ladder and more vaudevillian than thespian – that seemed to stay in the minds of most viewers.

There is a wonderful piece in Part 2, Section 9 on abstract scenery in which he uses a production of Measure for Measure and a row of doors which the audience had to understand were not all real all of the time. It was only down to a lack of cash and a small stage, and I doubt if many of the people watching needed a couple of pages of text to grasp the situation. Cerebral stagecraft gone excessive if not mad.

His character and intelligence have been missed for a long time. I can say that having never been an actor and placed under his direction. If I had been and been blessed with a grain of talent, I don't think I would be quite so generous.

[Merrian · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Friend Kim loaned me this book because I had shared some spooky Alice in Wonderland images I found on the internet. They were from a Jonathon Miller production. "Subsequent Performances" is fascinating reading for me in the light of the discussions about fan fiction (fanfic) in the romance genre.

"Subsequent Performances" by Jonathan Miller is about the role of the director in Theatre. Published in 1986, it is a reflection on the 'afterlife' of literary work; on the relationship between tradition (eg. Shakespeare's plays) and individual talent (the director's take). The book looks at the director's role and place creating interpretations in-between the text and the performer.

It seems to me "Subsequent Performances" offers another way to think about the relationship between original work and subsequent work. One of the things Miller talks about is the 'difficulty of extracting from either a dead or a living author the meaning of the play he [sic] has written' I think fanfic is often an attempt to create or give or document the meaning of the original work by its readers. Miller also talks about writers never fully being aware of the meanings that are present in a work they make. He suggests that original author's are in a privileged position in relation to their work but are not the sole arbiters of what it means. He talks about plays 'being emergent objects that can only be realised in many subsequent performances'. In this light I am also interested in the IASPR12 (International Association for Study of Popular Romance 2012 conference) tweets which have mentioned analysing romance novels in conjunction with their reviews and comments (e.g. on blogs like Dear Author) and reviews on Amazon. In the past only the book could or would have been discussed.