Shows promise, but could do better
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Donmar Warehouse
Brodie’s back. Not that, in a way, Muriel Spark’s most treasured creation – and one of the most quotably waspish and eccentric pedagogues in the canon – has ever quite been away. Anyone who has beheld Maggie Smith’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1969 film may well have felt like the select girls that the unorthodox spinster attempts to shape to her singular world-view: Smith’s remains a hard-to-forget mistress-class in acting.
Lia Williams steps into the role now in this new stage adaptation by the Scottish playwright David Harrower. And what’s admirable but not wholly successful is the way she dances away from the shadow of Smith’s tour de force. She down-plays the expected forcefulness of personality. Indeed, there are times in Polly Findlay’s production when this indomitable spirit is imparting her wisdoms and arch asides with the kind of subdued murmur more redolent of a forbidden lovers’ tryst.
That’s a valid enough interpretation. Though flamboyant in her attire – in stylish dressed-to-kill red at the start, green later, our heroine isn’t brazen about her off-topic approach to imparting knowledge; any minute, stern head teacher Miss Mackay (Sylvestra Le Touzel) could sweep in. And yet when combined with other aspects, the effect is curiously colourless.
Harrower makes a concerted (but counterproductive) effort to take a novel approach to the book. The look-back as to how Brodie held sway at “Marcia Blaine School for Girls” in Thirties Edinburgh – which permitted the original prose to roam chronologically, and ushered in much wry, dry wit – has been re-formulated. Sandy Stranger – “famous for her vowel sounds” you may recall, and the protegée who becomes her Mussolini-worshipping mentor’s betrayer – is observed on the eve of becoming a nun and taking her vow of silence; she’s quizzed by a reporter from the Scotsman, who haunts the action and intrudes the odd question – as thankless a task as teaching maths to the innumerate (take a bow, Kit Young). Spark’s way with words has been funnelled into a few instances of Brodie’s best aphorisms – “the crème de la crème” etc.
Designer Lizzie Clachan’s most visually arresting contribution is a bunch of church-bells, which chime with a pleasing but not hugely edifying regularity.
For Whom the Bell Tolls you half-think, and Harrower has foregrounded a minor character – the rich misfit Joyce Emily, who fatally heads off to fight against Franco. That should elicit pathos, but the rest of the girls have been so poorly differentiated – Rona Morison’s impish, alert Sandy aside – that a due sense of drama dwindles.
On the plus-side, Williams convinces as a woman who lives vicariously through her surrogate brood and who’s quietly anguished as to which futile romantic path to tread – caught between the one-armed Catholic charmer of an art teacher (Edward Macliam’s Teddy) and Angus Wright’s willowy music teacher Gordon. She’s got a tremendous beadiness of look and there’s a subtle comedy in how she glances askance across her shoulder. I so wanted to warm to her more, so wanted to give the show a more glowing final report overall. But “could try harder”, I think.
Until July 28. Tickets: 020 3282 3808; donmarwarehouse.com