Jonathan Miller: 'I'd like to have written more by the time I die Not that there has been much opportunity to test the theory in recent years. Miller's operatic productions continue to be revived with gusto - most recently The Mikado and Rigoletto at the ENO, Così fan tutte at Covent Garden - but he has not directed a play since Hamlet in Bristol five years ago. It just happens that as you get older you don't get asked to do things very much. Conductors go on being appreciated well into their eighties but directors don't. Apart from Peter Hall, of course. And Peter Brook. But let's leave that can of worms. When it comes to neglect, Githa Sowerby can show Miller a clean pair of heels. She died more or less forgotten aged 93 in 1970, and this year is enjoying a rare moment in the sun. Aside from Northern Broadsides" revival, the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond is mounting the UK premiere of The Stepmother (1924) and, in May, Theatre Royal York stages a one-woman biographical study, Githa. Compare and contrast with Miller, who has been in public life since even before Beyond the Fringe - as a star of the Cambridge Footlights, the Daily Mail reported on his marriage in 1956. Indeed by now his public may well have felt that they know everything that needs knowing. That changed this month with the publication of Kate Bassett's exhilarating new biography. In Two Minds is the product of ten years" research and Miller's blessing, although he insists he's not read it. I know most of what she must have written about me. And then of course you're always anxious about things which are antagonistic or critical. Above all the book shines a keen new light on his childhood as the first son of successful but unloving parents - his father Emanuel Miller pioneered child psychiatry in the UK, while his mother Betty Spiro was a novelist and biographer on the fringes of Bloomsbury. So one wonders whether Miller and Sowerby have something in common after all. Rutherford & Son hints at an Oedipal conflict between father and filial rebels - surely that ticked a box for him? No no no no. I don't believe in any of that stuff. That's psychoanalytic drivel. You cite this awful word 'Oedipal. I'm not interested in Oedipal ideas. It's about a bullying man with a tremendous sense of social ambition. And also the struggles to deal with manufacturing at a time of recession. That was the other thing that attracted me: it seemed so curiously relevant to our own time. The full answer is of course rather longer than this. People - family, friends, interviewers - have been sitting on the same sofa on which I find myself in North London for half a century as Miller's hypnotic monologues hopscotch and pinball about the place. It may explain why he can't get anything down on paper - by the time he's typed the first three words his brain is already at the start of the next paragraph. I'd like to have written more by the time I die. There are lots of things which I'd like to say which I can say when I talk which I find quite hard to write down. I get paralysed when I'm opposite a typewriter or computer. By way of illustration, I ask what the quondam comedian makes of contemporary stand-up. On the whole when I see the recordings of the comedians at the Apollo or the O2 most of it's to do with being obscene. There was a time when you couldn't say all those words. I'm amazed that it goes on amusing people. I mean I've always been interested in the structure of euphemism. I've got about three books on the history of it. You can see, what interests me is the anthropology of language, the anthropology of behaviour... And within three stepping stones we've leapt from Live at the Apollo to anthropologist WHR Rivers, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, Schafer's Textbook of Physiology and on and on. If he ever stops commuting between the arts and sciences, he's going to leave a gigantic hole. Rutherford & Son begins a national tour in Halifax on Feb 8. Tour details: northern-broadsides.co.uk