The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Adapted by David Harrower from the novel by Muriel Spark Director: Polly Findlay
Donmar Warehouse, Earlham Street, London WC2 (020-3282 3808). Until 28 July
Running time: 2hrs 35mins (including interval) The roll call of actresses who have played Muriel Spark’s “brilliant” creation Jean Brodie – the “dangerously influential” teacher in 1930s Edinburgh who inspires and destroys the young girls in her charge – is impressive indeed, said Paul Taylor in The Independent. Vanessa Redgrave starred in the first stage version in 1966; Maggie Smith won an Oscar for the film three years later. And Geraldine Mcewan, Fiona Shaw and Patricia Hodge have all given notable interpretations. But even by these standards, Lia Williams is revelatory. She strides from the shadows of her predecessors with a tragicomic portrayal that “arouses – more complexly” than any I’ve seen – the “ambivalence we feel towards” Brodie, a figure “at once magnificent and ridiculous, formidable and vulnerable, richly comic and yet destined for a tragically isolated end”.
This new adaptation (the first for 52 years) of Spark’s adored novel comes courtesy of the Scottish playwright David Harrower, a man who clearly “knows Brodie-land well” and has captured the Jean of the novel in all her “pomposity and danger and inspiration”, said Ann Treneman in The Times. Her secret sherry parties. Her fostering of cliques. Her insistent admiration for Mussolini. We watch as Jean – in the form of “magnetic, charismatic, vulnerable” Williams – weaves her spell on “her” girls in defiance of the pedestrian headmistress. (“I am cashmere as opposed to Miss Mackay’s granite,” she purrs.) “Is this the crème de la crème? Oh I think so.”
In my view, Williams takes the ambivalence too far and downplays Jean’s force of personality too much, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Combined with other aspects of the evening – Harrower’s too-tricksy framing device, the austere staging – the effect is “curiously colourless”. Yet Williams is never less than completely convincing. And hers is not the only fine performance, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. Rona Morison nicely captures the “remorseless watchfulness” and beady intelligence of Sandy, a star pupil, and Sylvestra Le Touzel is “all corseted strictness” as Miss Mackay.