The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie review, The Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh: 'Spectacular'
“To call Vicky Featherstone’s production spectacular is to understate the case.”
Culture wars, it seems, are nothing new. In Muriel Spark’s brilliant 1960 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the leading character Jean Brodie - a teacher in a genteel private girls’ school in Edinburgh, during the troubled 1930’s - is conducting a bold and sometimes magnificent one-woman rebellion against what she sees as the ugly and joyless Calvinist culture of the society around her.
Instead, she seeks to impart to “her girls” - a select groups of favoured pupils - a devotion to “goodness, beauty and truth” that defies conservative and conventional social norms, viewing them with utter contempt; and it’s this warrior aspect of Jean Brodie that leaps to the fore in the National Theatre of Scotland’s splendid and sometimes stunning new production of David Harrower’s 2018 stage version of the story.
To call Vicky Featherstone’s production spectacular is to understate the case, as the lights go up on Chloe Lamford’s set of giant tiered steps that seem consciously to echo the architecture of the great fascist arenas of 1930’s Europe, dramatically lit in art deco style by Lizzie Powell. Behind them, Lewis den Hertog’s huge 30-foot screen images of great art and fascist rallies haunt the moments between scenes; and it’s at the top of the steps that we first meet Gayle Rankin’s astonishing Miss Brodie, wearing a tight pink leather calf length skirt with a fierce parody of an academic gown in poison-green chiffon - all Anna Orton’s Brodie costume designs seem inspired by the wild experimental reaches of 1930’s fashion, dialled up a 21st century notch or two.
If the visual grandeur of the production is sometimes distracting and a shade cumbersome, though, Vicky Featherstone’s formidable cast generally seem more than able to match its impact. Gayle Rankin is both brilliant and poignant in capturing the occasional moments of vulnerability and bewilderment behind Miss Brodie’s bold facade, as she faces down a world that has robbed her of a fiance in one war, and left her incapable of playing the obedient roles expected of women during the fragile peace.
And around her, the great Maureen Beattie as despised headmistress Miss McKay, Brian Ferguson as a memorably devoted and humiliated Mr Lowther, and the brilliant quintet of Bobby Rainsbury, Shreya Kaund Marshall, Tallulah Greive, Liberty Black and Sophie Fortune as “special girls’ Sandy, Jenny, Monica, Mary and Joyce Emily, all fulfil their roles in this fast-darkening version of the story with a memorable intensity end sense of purpose.
Pippa Murphy’s music is an ominous rock blast from the future, the movement is powerful, the show is long without ever losing pace; and the end is devastating, a wasteland of misdirected passion and terrible political misjudgement, redeemed only by Sandy’s ability, like that of Muriel Spark, to write it down, and to transform the story into something as rich, contradictory and haunting as the precipitous city of Edinburgh itself, whose presence breathes through every line of the novel, and of this powerful adaptation.
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 18 October; the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, 21-24 October; His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 29-31 October; and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, 4-7 November.
Keep up to date with arts and culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.