The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Royal Lyceum Theatre and on tour – review

In a city that doesn’t lack for colourful literary characters, Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie has always held a particular grip on Edinburgh’s imagination. Maybe that’s because the overbearing schoolmistress has a strange way of both upholding and subverting the city’s ideas about itself, or maybe it’s because Spark’s novel brings so many corners of the city to recognisable life. Either way, Edinburgh’s Lyceum was the only serious choice for the National Theatre of Scotland to begin its tour of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in a new adaptation by David Harrower, vigorously directed by Vicky Featherstone.

As you’d guess from the name, any adaptation of Spark’s novel stands or falls on the performance of the title character, and this production strikes gold in Gayle Rankin’s Miss Brodie. She’s riveting to watch, and holds the stage in her grip right from her magisterial first entrance, Anna Orton’s designs costuming her with sleeves so long that they drape along the ground; a visual reinforcement of the way she dominates every environment she’s in.

Rankin has all of the charisma needed to bring Brodie to life, so gripping in the play’s first act that the audience gets a taste of what it must have been like to be one of the girls in the “Brodie set”. Every word Rankin speaks feels carefully considered and thoughtfully articulated, whether she is extolling Mussolini or ecstatically rhapsodising over the profile of a girl’s face. She exerts as much of a hold over her girls as she does over the men who fixate on her: they are brought to life with expert subtlety by Brian Ferguson as the buttoned-up Presbyterian music master and Dyfan Dwyfor as the stormy, sexually tormented art teacher.

The girls are all characterised very distinctively, and it’s to the actors’ credit that they so skilfully inhabit three different phases of their lives. Bobby Rainsbury makes Sandy’s journey completely believable, whether she is turning her back on her young friend – a poignantly believable Sophie Fortune – or visiting Miss Brodie as a mature adult trying to make her peace. Shreya Khaund Marshall makes Jenny seem unlucky for being mature beyond her years, while Liberty Black’s Mary and Tallulah Greive’s Monica show the cracks in the Brodie set as they become the first to break away. Maureen Beattie oversees them all with Puritan earnestness as Miss Mackay, the disapproving headmistress.

The action unfolds naturally in Chloe Lamford’s lecture theatre set, while Lewis den Hertog’s subtle video projections gently underline both the narrative and the psychological goings-on behind it.

Harrower’s adaption begins engagingly, but it’s far too long, and several scenes (and crudely symbolist scene changes) could have been cut or condensed. Furthermore, the second act loses focus, with confrontations that become unnecessarily shouty and some slightly heavy-handed attempts to link the action to contemporary concerns about grooming or coercive control.

Aside from that, however, this is a hugely engaging opportunity to meet a great Edinburgh character again, and Rankin’s central performance is a treat.