Intellectuals are meant to be absent-minded. All the same, I was taken aback when Jonathan Miller postponed our meeting the afternoon before it was due to take place. He had forgotten that he was supposed to be lunching with the Queen. I took my jilting like a man, although the Queen would not have noticed if Miller had stood her up instead of me. The same invitation had gone out to 300 people, allegedly the élite of British achievers, who were rounded up at Mansion House by the Lord Mayor for a 'lunch of the century'.
My appointment was rearranged for the following day at Wilton's Music Hall, an atmospheric, grotty East End dive where Miller was rehearsing Broomhill Opera's new production of The Beggar's Opera . His life consists of such quick changes: hob-nobbing with toffs one day, the next keeping company with the grubby criminal skivers who populate John Gay's eighteenth-century fable about moral hypocrisy and institutionalised graft. Prepared for another metamorphosis, or perhaps concerned to fuel an unsleeping, maniacally inquisitive brain, Miller had brought along a book called Beyond Modularity, a contribution to cognitive science. To forestall a discussion of modularity, I asked how he'd enjoyed his centennial lunch.
His reply was a groan, accompanied by some rubbery facial ructions.He looks a bit like Mr Punch, although his phiz has been dolefully lengthened by the thinking that goes on behind it, rather than twisted by malice 'Oh God,' he said, 'that was a shaming occasion.' I expected a more guarded reaction, but Miller is candid, not canny, true to his thoughts and unable to edit them as discretion requires. 'I went because it would have seemed churlish and self-righteous to refuse. In return, I had to listen to Robin Day make a self-serving speech in which he flattered the Queen by saying that she was the greatest achiever of us all.'
Miller allowed his face to comment silently on Day's sycophancy. His mouth twitched at the corners, his eyes threatened to roll, but he stopped short of chortling. The wicked wit of his early days - his theatrical career began in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe in 1961 - has given way to anger and a self-mortifying sense of impotence. 'Here I am,' he said, '66 years old, in a bad and dangerous world, and pleased to know I won't have to see much more of it.'
Meanwhile, he cannot help registering the inanities of that world. Who, I disingenuously inquired, had been at the lunch? 'A lot of virtuous postmistresses,' said Miller 'and many paraplegic swimmers. There, in the centre room, was the Queen, with Mrs Thatcher near her. They were like the red and white queens in Alice. Thatcher even had on a black hat which was a sort of cylindrical crown; her costume was identical in format to the Queen's.'
Miller has an abiding contempt for the batty baroness, and his production of The Beggar's Opera examines the 'wolfish individualism' she encouraged. Though first performed in 1728, this underworld pastoral remains, he believes 'a most timely piece' since New Labour has cosily reconciled itself to the vulpine market forces which impel Gay's cheats and swindlers. Miller is unimpressed by the shiny Pepsodent patina of Blair.
'We ushered out a gang of crooks when we sacked the Tories, then immediately welcomed in an advertising agency. And the eighteenth-century obsession with commodity and interest, which makes Gay's beggars so predatory, has become second nature to us.'
Had the Lord Mayor's placement manoeuvred Miller and Thatcher together at lunch? 'No,' said Miller. 'I sat opposite a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist. We talked about reductionism and whether consciousness will always elude us as a scientific concept, what a colleague of mine, a philosopher, calls cognitive closure.'
If you wanted to mock Miller, which, admiring his myriad-mindedness, his playful way with ideas, and his verbal energy, I do not, you would only need to quote this sentence. Yet before you could do so, you might find Miller mocking himself, as he immediately did. 'There was an Irish woman at the same table, who listened to all of this.' Miller then delivered her verdict on his small talk in a hectoring Belfast brogue. 'She said, "You two are on a higher plane of thought; I'd say you need some diversionary therapy!"'
Miller complains about the national mistrust of cleverness and flinches whenever he is referred to as Dr Miller. He knows that his polymathic talents, his articulacy and even his medical degree are held against him. He is also aware that these lofty slurs are sneakily anti-Semitic. He is the victim of his multifarious skills, unsure that he made the right choice when he abandoned medical research. He likes to argue that it was not a choice but a chancy detour.
'I was sidetracked into opera. I didn't know much about it, or even like it. But I lived near the conductor Roger Norrington, and one day in 1975, while we were waiting for our children outside the school they went to, he asked if I'd ever thought of doing Cosi fan tutte. I hadn't, but I did it for him at Kent Opera. Then at the ENO, I was entirely the creature of Lord Harewood, who let me do the Mafia Rigoletto in 1982.' (Miller briefly adopted the bray affected by male royals when quoting Harewood: 'He said, "Yes, by George, I think it might just work!"')
A rankling conscience, which tells him he has betrayed his calling as a physical healer and a mental quester, makes him relish the setbacks in his theatrical career. In 1990, he quit the Old Vic because of a budgetary dispute. His production of A Midsummer Night's Dream had to be cancelled; eventually, he directed the play at the Almeida in 1996 where it was, he told me with a remorseful grimace, 'a catastrophe'.
Miller conceives of the theatre as a place of psychological and even physiological experimentation. 'Seeing people pretending to be someone else helps us actually to be who we are.' But who is Miller? He is, I think, a living demonstration of what philosophers call the mind-body problem. That morning, he had coaxed a soubrette in The Beggar's Opera to chew her nail while singing and then pensively spit out a fragment of cuticle.Recently in Vienna, he persuaded the soprano Edita Gruberova to gibber melodiously through a mad scene in Bellini's I Puritani while prone on the floor, where, as he put it with a chuckle: 'She could have been thoracically compromised!'
What intrigues him is the way ideas are translated into psychosomatic quirks. 'I'm fascinated by the sub-intentional stream of conduct, by how the nervous system instigates action. The theatre can be a laboratory for studying behaviour. Bodies have a unique, confidential way of talking.' Miller's own body, I noticed, kept up a jittery monologue as he spoke. His brow wrinkled, his legs curled and twisted, his hands knotted, blood boiled to the surface of his skin and then drained away. He resembled Rodin's Thinker, except that the statue twisted on its pedestal while greedily ingesting cigarettes.
Miller concedes that consciousness is 'an absolute mystery', but disparages mysticism. 'I'm agnostic in the deepest sense of agnosia,' he said with a donnishly etymological flourish. 'I can't imagine an after-life, because a person can't be disembodied. Whatever would an unembodied human be like?' I pointed out that there are moments in opera in which the spirit quits the flesh before our eyes, thanks to the intercession of music - the love-death of Wagner's Isolde, for instance.
Miller nodded and pleaded guilty. 'I did Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles with designs by Hockney. It was disastrous. But there can be soulfulness without the existence of a soul, which is why I'm a pious atheist. There are moments in Mozart which I'd call celestial. When the two ladies in Figaro sing a duet while writing that letter, a kind of thought-transference happens.The music makes them volatilise. The aria consumes the bodies of the singers, and when it's over you sense this wafting, invisible breeze. It's like a candle consuming the wax as it burns. In fact, it resembles that Flemish altar piece at the Cloisters in New York, where a candle has just whooshed out and you sense an agitation in the air, caused by the angel who's bringing the news of the annunciation to the Virgin. Now who is that picture by?'
Miller tried out a few Flemish-sounding names. There is, I'm afraid, no such painting at the Cloisters; this lapsed academic sometimes fudges his footnotes. 'I do gabble on, don't I?' he said as he gathered up his copy of Beyond Modularity and returned to rehearsal.
He was due to spend the afternoon in another ingenious act of equilibration, teaching the singers of The Beggar's Opera how to act as grittily as characters in EastEnders or The Bill, while also conjuring up the ghostly theoretical presence of economists like Hobbes, Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.
He left behind an uneaten bagel. Our talk was supposed to double as lunch, but Miller feeds on air and ideas. After he'd gone, I thought about the extinguished candle flame in that non-existent altar piece. A cyclone of cerebration had whirled through the room, only to be abruptly snuffed out.
The Beggar's Opera runs to 18 Dec at Wilton's Music Hall, London E1 (0870 906 3739)
