Jonathan Miller - The 'trendy Jew': 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' (23/48)
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- Опубліковано 10 жов 2017
- To listen to more of Jonathan Miller’s stories, go to the playlist: • Jonathan Miller (Theat...
Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was a British theatre and opera director whose work includes a West End production of "The Merchant of Venice" which starred Laurence Olivier and a modern, Mafia-themed version of "Rigoletto". [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: I can’t remember how I came to do the 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' by MR James. I mean, I’ve never been particularly interested in ghosts. I’m interested in the sociology and the social anthropology of ghosts, of what belief in ghosts consists of and what they represent in terms of mental constructs, that was very fascinating to me. And so I took the story of MR James and modified it tremendously. I didn’t do it... I didn’t literally recreate it as James had written it because actually it’s very... again, it’s rather a mandarin sort of Cambridge don's piece. But it was an opportunity for talking about what it would’ve been like to have been a rational intellectual suddenly exposed to possibly his own fears of the supernatural.
And I was lucky enough to get Michael Hordern to do it, and he played it brilliantly. I wrote... I completely rewrote all the conversations and, of course, then was attacked by another, sort of, English gent for whom I would’ve been, but he couldn’t put it in those words, a sort of trendy Jew, and that was Kingsley Amis, who just attacked it violently. - Розваги
I loved this film adaptation. The character had so much knowledge and so much to comment on that he did it incessantly, and was reduced to an infant sucking his thumb with a two word vocabulary, “Oh no.”
I also love how his “Oh no” went from a higher child’s tone after first beholding the thing in his room to a lower registered “Oh no” indicating he was recovering his senses and soon would be just as critical and dismissive as he ever was.
Great interview. If you shut your eyes and did not see J Miller, you would think you were listening to Jeremy Irons.
He set the precedent for BBC's classic Ghost Stories for Christmas that Lawrence Gordon Clark excelled in directing. Jonathan Miller's 1968 adaptation of M. R. James was the prototype.
Brilliant adaptation
His version is well worth viewing, I think, but I am still waiting for someone to make a faithful version of the story, within the constraints of a visual, rather than a literary, medium. I think that would be popular and interesting.
Have you seen the 2010 version?
Sadly, I did see it, but, mercifully, I remember very little of the experience, now.@@RataStuey