The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Review
Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic.
The famously mercurial Muriel Spark never really found a home in her birthplace, finding that the adverb “nevertheless” best described Edinburgh. However, rich in its contradictions and complexities, the city fed into her writing, immortalised in the titular character Jean Brodie from her 1961 novel.
In David Harrower’s adaptation, produced by the National Theatre of Scotland, Brodie’s doctrine of “goodness, truth, and beauty” which she casts upon her select pupils arrives in the form of shoe-flicking, laying, and roaring across Chloe Lamford’s pink amphitheatre with an umbrella-like light domineering above.
Returning home, Scottish actress Gayle Rankin takes on the formidable titular character. In a role paved by great actresses, Rankin unabashedly reshapes Brodie to be fiercer and overtly sexual, but equally lacking in nuance and calculation. Strangely, she’s also somewhat nervous at times — the fear of the orthodox headmistress Miss Mackay (Maureen Beattie) entering her classroom weakens her poise.
Director Vicky Featherstone, NTS’s inaugural Artistic Director, equally stumbles — she overstretches Brodie’s seductive nature which causes her romantic orchestrations with art teacher Mr Lloyd (Dyfan Dwyfor) and choirmaster Mr Lowther (Brian Ferguson) to lose their significance. In a painstaking scene, Brodie lays before Lloyd and pulls up her skirt to expose herself. Featherstone also strangely retains Dwyfor at the back of the amphitheatre for extended periods where he fades into a nonentity.
Where Featherstone does show stability is in her direction of the Brodie Set, led by the truly magnetic Sandy (Bobby Rainsbury), who brings her teacher’s dangerous manipulations to an end. Adorned with Peter Pan collars, they giddily run and crawl over one other, offering a convincing adolescence.
David Harrower has revised his 2018 Donmar adaptation, but it’s hard to see what he has sharpened in the process. With a three-hour running time, it lacks grip. A blindly-led pacing veers the action away from focus — where he draws out lengthy educational rhetoric from Mackay in the opening, he hurries critical stages in Brodie’s eventual downfall. Even her eminent aphorisms are sandwiched between useless guff, blunting her presence.
And in a production which tirelessly tries to uproot modernity from the text, Harrower and Featherstone erroneously remould one of the story’s most pertinent political motifs — Mary Macgregor (Liberty Black), the mousy peripheral scapegoat. Mary, now firmly in the set, is nothing more than a loud nuisance who Brodie loses her temper over.
If it’s not Brodie plying her girls with sherry to pulsing electronic music, it’s in her contempt of footwear. This adaptation, in its misguided search for something new to say, frankly loses sight of its source material.
Where the novel is a spark, this is a mere flicker.
★★
Written by David for Theatre and Tonic, October 2026.