“As a teacher of young girls, her behaviour today would see her cancelled, de-platformed and almost certainly up in court,” said Magnus Linklater in The Times. At a private girls’ school in 1930s Edinburgh, Jean Brodie indoctrinates her pupils with her fascist politics, goes in for sexual grooming, and is having an affair with a fellow teacher.
She is “every headteacher’s nightmare”, and yet she is also brilliant. She fosters an elite set of girls who, she says, are the “crème de la crème”, and she encourages them to have the highest of ambitions.
Maggie Smith won an Oscar for her performance as this extraordinary character in the 1969 film version of Muriel Spark’s book. And in Vicky Featherstone’s stunning new stage production, Gayle Rankin makes her “more extraordinary still”, said Mark Fisher in The Guardian. Sharp-tongued, bohemian and sexually forthright, this Brodie is as impossible to ignore as an “exotic moth”. Pupils and staff love or loathe her, and “you never doubt why”. But only one teenager, Sandy, sees through her, and brings her down as if she were a Coriolanus or a Lear, “too damaged by her private losses to see her own flaws”.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week US
To call this National Theatre of Scotland production “spectacular is to understate the case”, said Joyce McMillan in The Scotsman. The stage is dominated by giant, pink-carpeted steps that “echo the architecture of the great fascist arenas of 1930s Europe”. On a 30ft screen behind them, images of great works of art and fascist rallies “haunt the moments between scenes”. Such visual grandeur could have overwhelmed the action but the formidable cast prove a match for it, and, while David Harrower’s adaptation is long, it never loses pace. It builds to a “devastating” end.
Rankin is magnificent, said Mark Brown in The Telegraph, and she is supported brilliantly by everyone from Maureen Beattie as the headteacher to the “superb” five-strong ensemble who play the Brodie girls. This is terrific narrative theatre, “atmospheric, visceral and cerebral”.
Lyceum, Edinburgh, to 18 October, then touring Scotland to 7 November
