Exclusive:The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: The Muriel Spark fax which gave playwright go-ahead for 'radical' adaptation
David Harrower has been working on the script for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie since 2003
She is the iconic literary character of an Edinburgh school teacher who is “woven into the tapestry” of the city through one of Scotland’s most beloved novels.
Now playwright David Harrower has told how his “radical” adaptation of “slippery book” The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which is to be premiered in the capital next week, was more than 20 years in the making - after author Muriel Spark sent him a fax giving him the go-ahead for the project.
Edinburgh-born Harrower told how he had first contacted Spark in 2003 via their mutual literary agency, Casarotto Ramsay, as a young playwright to ask for her approval to adapt the novel and received a fax saying he ”sounded interesting” and asking for samples of his work.
His script was first performed at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2018, but Harrower says he has made significant changes when returning to it for the current National Theatre of Scotland production, which stars Gayle Rankin as the eponymous teacher, to portray the “dark” side of Spark’s story.
Harrower, who is also behind play Blackbird, which was inspired in part by the crimes of sex offender Toby Studebaker, said: “I’ve got this fax from Muriel Spark from when I made the first inquiry. She says something like, ‘this young writer, David Harrower, sounds very interesting’. That was 23 years ago.”
He had seen a version of Jay Presson Allen’s 1966 adaptation at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre in 2003, starring Siobhan Redmond, but also featuring Rankin as one of the young girls in Miss Brodie’s class.
“I thought, ‘This needs a new version’,” he said. “So I wrote to Muriel Spark and she replied via her agent saying she’d be up for this - if I was good enough.”
Ms Spark asked to see some of Harrower’s work.
“She had to judge whether I was good enough,” he said. “But it happened.”
He said Ms Spark had seen - and approved of - an early draft of the script before she died in 2006, but described adapting the book as “slippery”.
“You’ve got to unscrew it and look at it and find out what you want to tease out of it, because you can’t put everything in,” he said. “I knew Dame Spark was going to be reading it and judging it. She read an early version of it and obviously thought it was promising enough to allow me to continue.”
He believes there is a “warmth” towards the character of the “beloved” Edinburgh school teacher in Scotland, but said he wanted to ask the audience, “Are you reading this right?”.
“How much sympathy should you have for Brodie?” he said. “I’m trying to show that she is both ridiculous and tragic at the same time.
“People laugh when they talk about Miss Brodie because they’re thinking of Maggie Smith in the film version and there’s a warmth towards her. Miss Brodie is totally an Edinburgh character and she’s loved, but it’s like ‘are you reading this right?’ and I include myself in that because I want to think the best of her.
“Of course you want someone like Miss Brodie in your life. You want someone to point a finger at you and say, ‘I see something other people don’t, you are really special and nobody can see that apart from me’ - and that is such a wonderful thing to give a young person.
“But what happens when you don’t fulfil that, or you disappoint that person? She takes it too far into a dangerous zone and then an ultimate tragic area, so what are we celebrating?”
He added: “There will be older people watching it [in Scotland] where Brodie will have been woven through their lives like she has been mine, as this legendary figure. People get it in their head that Miss Brodie represents that Edinburgh phrase ‘fur coat and nae knickers’, or people smile because she’s got an Edinburgh mindset. I’m not nervous about the Edinburgh audience, but I am excited.
“She’s so woven into the tapestry of Edinburgh, the darkness of it, because it is a dark book. It’s fatalistic and deterministic and doubts the sense of free will. It’s this special thing for Edinburgh. It’s going to Glasgow and Aberdeen and Pitlochry and it’s going to register in those places differently. She is the daughter of Edinburgh, which is so exciting because she represents a twisted, dark Edinburgh.”
He said he had made significant changes to the script when preparing it for a Scottish audience.
“I revisited it when preparing for this production,” he said. “I went back and re-read the novel again and again and again and no matter how many times you read it, its genius becomes more apparent. The architecture of it just becomes more breathtaking and bamboozling.
“I’m so in awe of it and what Muriel Spark was trying to do. I’m from Edinburgh and I know the places she’s talking about. I’ve gone back and really dived into it and I’m kind of presenting a new version. I read the novel again and thought there bits I should have added into it, or found strains of thought I should have looked more at - is Brodie a facist or is she not? I’m thinking more about the times and what women had to go through then.”
He added: “It is so well known, but then on the other hand, it’s not, Spark is often hiding things in these sentences that almost contradict each other within the same sentence and you realise there’s little things glinting in the undergrowth, about Brodie, or about what Sandy Stranger thinks of her.
“I’m really proud of the version I did at Donmar, but it’s just when you go back to things eight years later, things have changed and you’re reading the novel in a different way. It’s a short novel, but there’s so much hidden in it.”
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie will open at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh on Friday, October 9, before touring to Glasgow, Aberdeen and Pitlochry.
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