‘Miss Jean Brodie’ Is Still in Its Prime on London Stage

Great Britain, a country known for its trust in conformity, loves “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” a morality tale about a woman who goes too far and pays the price. The play was revived in the West End only three years ago, and it’s already back again. A splendid new production at the National Theatre stars Fiona Shaw as the charismatic Scottish schoolteacher who, in the 1930s, casts an unhealthy spell over her brood of pubescent “little geerls,” as she calls them, until one of them “puts a stop” to her.

Jay Presson Allen has rejiggered her 1966 drama, adapted from Muriel Spark’s novel about education, sex and fascism. Among other changes, Allen excised a clunky device involving a journalist who interviews one of Brodie’s students after she’s grown up to become a nun. The play flows better. But it still stubbornly refuses to offer up an ending anywhere near as satisfying as the body of the tale.

A woman in her prime, as she keeps reminding everyone, Miss Brodie believes herself to be above the common herd. Her students find her fascinating and more passionate than anyone they’ve ever seen; she promises to make of them “la creme de la creme.” To the conservative headmistress Miss Mackay, Miss Brodie is a disruptive influence and a nuisance. Superbly played by Annette Badland, Miss Mackay is a bureaucrat to her toes, expert at injecting contempt into the most banal and polite of sentences.

Miss Brodie is a great part (Maggie Smith is magnificent in the 1969 film version of the novel), and Shaw makes it her own. In her crimson skirt and turquoise blouse, she is a tower of color, imposing and strong-boned, but with a wild sadness in oval eyes that slope dramatically downward. To the delight of her girls, she captures the attention of two male teachers, one of whom calls her “the only sex-bestirred object” in the school. Shaw’s Brodie is excitable; she mixes with her girls and gets closer to them than Maggie Smith’s chilly Brodie. This makes her more endearing and creepier: Shaw’s Brodie clearly needs the girls to act as adoring audience, and without them her flamboyance might just appear a kind of desperate neediness.

While they are still pubescent, her girls adore Brodie. Her attention seems to promise them a life full of drama and self-esteem. But she demands worship, a demand that takes on a disturbing sheen as she develops a strong admiration for Mussolini and, later, for Hitler. The closer Miss Brodie comes to disaster at school, the fiercer this admiration grows.

Shaw’s frequent director Phyllida Lloyd keeps the National’s Lyttelton stage wide open, and the scenes shift from past to present, from schoolroom to convent to country house to artist’s studio. Actors in costume roll props on and off, which emphasizes the many human hands taking part in Miss Brodie’s undoing. Young actresses passing for ages 10 to 17 fill the stage, leaping through their gym exercises, hanging out on movable ladders, practicing their violins and choir pieces. Their singing and playing provides a haunting, liturgical glow to the story. Shifting around the stage in groups, the girls are a constant, watchful presence, mirroring the audience watching from the other side for Brodie’s inevitable self-destruction.

In the hands of the skillful Susannah Wise, Sandy is the smartest of the Brodie set, a lumpy-faced girl who verges on pretty and is painfully aware she isn’t quite. Wise’s eyes shine as Miss Brodie speaks to the group, telling each girl something key about their personalities. Sandy waits to hear something wonderful about herself. Miss Brodie dismisses her with a single adjective--”dependable.” At that moment, Sandy changes from a girl to a young woman, from passive to active, and from an innocent to a betrayer.

Spark described Brodie as having an “exotic suicidal enchantment.” Allen and Lloyd overstate the situation. The play opens with a tableau that echoes Leonardo’s “Last Supper” with Brodie as Jesus and the girls her apostles. The climax comes as Sandy plants a Judas kiss on Miss Brodie’s cheek, and with Shaw assuming another Christ-like pose.

Brodie may be Christ-like in her own mind, but in fact she is a grandiose and guilty figure, a teacher who urges her young students to march around the room waving flags glorifying Mussolini and Hitler. She influences her girls but, disastrously, never really sees them for what they are. At the end, the audience needs a summation, a point of view that is not Miss Brodie’s and not Sandy’s. The play lacks this larger perspective, but it is a great story and a tragic one--despite Brodie’s obvious culpability. Fiona Shaw brings her to life in all of her complex, needy glory.

* Royal National Theatre, South Bank, London, 011 441 71 452-3000. The show continues in London through September and tours England in October and November.