Jean Brodie has entered the classroom of Mr Lowther (Brian Ferguson). She tells the music teacher she will not be a distraction. Nothing can proceed as if Jean Brodie was not there.
Played by Gayle Rankin in a drape-sleeved top and figure-hugging leather skirt, she is impossible to ignore. Chloe Lamford’s dust-pink set is a little bit lecture theatre, an awful lot neo-classical staircase; Rankin floats across it like an exotic moth: colourful, distractable, ever present. Pupils and teachers loathe or love her.
She is compellingly herself. In a re-defining performance, Rankin makes Muriel Spark’s extraordinary heroine more extraordinary still. In Vicky Featherstone’s production for the Royal Lyceum and the National Theatre of Scotland, she is funny, sharp-tongued and sexually forthright.
Out goes 1930s starchiness, in comes the bohemian avant garde. She slips off her zebra-striped heels and walks in bare feet. Her singularity comes at a cost.
Headteacher Miss Mackay (Maureen Beattie) is worried about educational attainment: today, we would be more concerned about child protection. Brodie’s approval of the predatory art teacher Mr Lloyd (Dyfan Dwyfor) is only one of her contradictions. Those contradictions keep us guessing.
To be enamoured of Italian art and European fashion is one thing; to admire Mussolini is another. Her elitism would be at home in an Ayn Rand novel were it not for Spark’s political nous and ironic wit, crisply captured here in David Harrower’s adaptation. On the one hand, we might like her rationality and reason, her desire to create “young heroines of the future” and her amusing distaste for team spirit.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
