The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

One gets the feeling that if Jean Brodie herself was to bring a show to the Fringe, she would have a five-star hit on her hands.

The home crowd would lap up her brilliantly scathing observations on the status quo and be moved by her reminiscences about her lost soldier love. She would perhaps even stride over to the piano for a duet with Mr Lowther, and audiences might even join in with some call-and-response of her famous catchphrases.

Jay Presson Allan’s stage adaptation of Muriel Spark’s famous novel is, of course, a different prospect. It is a play of two contrasting halves: the first introduces Brodie and her set, and her power struggle with the disapproving Miss Mackay; the second charts her downfall.

An interval would make a lot of sense – no doubt the reason this Scottish-English co-production has just a two-minute ‘pause’ is technical rather than artistic. The audience are in their seats for more than two hours, but it’s nonetheless difficult to understand why the play’s climactic scene has been spliced in two and trimmed in the process, resulting in a rather curious ending.

The aptly-named Anna Francolini makes an enigmatic, guarded Brodie, and the dynamics of the production allow her to maintain her defiance until the end. While she doesn’t so much as wobble while teaching her girls or clashing with her superiors, from the beginning there is a nagging sense that she may be going through the motions, and talking of passion rather than feeling it, all too aware that she is nearing the end of her prime.

The casting of more than a dozen local schoolgirls in supporting roles poses a challenge to the professional cast, and while they generally succeed in blending in, Nicola Jo Cully’s performance as Monica (known for her histrionics) has an unfortunate tendency to stand out as ‘acted’. At times she makes Anneika Rose’s wide-eyed Mary McGregor seems almost sophisticated by comparison.

The irresistible appeal of the Jean Brodie character means that primed audiences will enjoy any competent production of the play, or at least the first half of it. For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like, as Miss B would say. Those coming to it fresh might be as well to read the novel for now and wait for the chance to see a different production in a more leisurely context.