THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE.
Edinburgh/Glasgow
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE
by Muriel Spark adapted by Jay Presson Allan
Royal Lyceum Theatre Company at Glasgow Theatre Royal 11-15 February 2003
Runs 2hr 30min One interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 February
An imaginative staging which honours a piece of multi-layered fiction.This somewhat dated adaptation of Muriel Spark's slender, most celebrated novel ought to have little going for it. Theatrical styles for adapting novels have moved on impressively since Jean Brodie took to the stage in 1966. Yet Muriel Romanes and Siobhan Redmond make this revival an intriguing, moving experience.
That's partly the addenda. We first meet Miss Brodie and ex-pupil Sandy in a post-war Edinburgh tea-shop, Jean complaining about whichever of her crème de la crème pupils betrayed her. A decade after her foreshortened prime, she still worries who it can be.
Romanes places this at the back, veiled by a gauze: the 'present' becomes remote, the past a more real, vivid world – as it was for Brodie herself. But the context gives her a vulnerability matched by Redmond's performance. However much the words flow, there's a glibness which gives all the talk about her own 'prime' an underlying sadness. Having watched this, any performance that makes Brodie seem simply confident is likely to appear the easy option.
The stage is flanked by rows of doors suggesting an old school-building, through which Redmond flares with assurance, manipulating the ins and outs as fluently as she does the attempts of Alexandra Mathie's Miss Mackay, Head of Marcia Blaine Academy for Girls, to bring her under some sort of control. Bunny Christie's set also allows Jean to pursue her affair round at the music teacher's home, seeing off domestic eyes prying from a distant door with a confident centre-stage wave.
Culture-drenched Brodie would veer to the Art and Music teachers (did any other men teach at Marcia Blaine Academy in the 1930s?). But her flamboyant flirtations with them are as superficial and self-obsessed as Redmond's manner suggests Jean's interest in art itself to be.
It all leads back logically to the post-war tea-room and the distant, diminished Brodie, Clare Yuille steps forward to us, adult and now more prominent than her teacher, severely-bespectacled, not unlike Muriel Spark. At last we discover the trusted traitor and understand Brodie's downfall resulted from her protegee's development to a wider, deeper type of truth.
Jean Brodie: Siobhan Redmond
Sandy Stranger: Clare Yuille
Teddy Lloyd: Kevin McMonagle
Gordon Lowther: Peter Kelly
Miss Mackay: Alexandra Mathie
Monica Douglas: Frances Thorburn
Jenny Shaw: Susan Coyle
Mary McGregor: Nicola Jo Cully
Miss Gauint/Miss Campbell/Miss Lockhart: Irene Allen
Schoolgirls: Laurie Anderson, Lucy Armes, Emma Balantine, Elizabeth Brotherston, Jessica Chalmers, Daisy Chute, Hazel Darwin Edwards, Jessica Dewar, Helena du Toit, Kim Gerard, Jennifer Gowans, Amy Leach, Sinead Leach, Ailidh Mackay, Kirsty Mackay, Emily Nicholl MacPhail, Jessica Morton, Gayle Rankin, Frances Ross, Gemma Stroyan, Gillian Taylor, Lesley Ann Turner
Director: Muriel Romanes
Assistant Director: Rosie Kellagher
Young People's Director: Colin Bradie
Designer: Bunny Christie
Lighting: Chris Davey
Costume: Shirley Robinson
Musical Director: Hilary Brooks
Musical Co-ordinator: Kirsten Roan
Choreographer: Jane Howie
2003-03-03 00:44:30