The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Theatre review by Simon Ward

11 May 2010

THE ROYAL and Derngate has opened its season on the Royal Stage with a production of Muriel Spark's classic 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Directed by Laurie Sansom, it marks the first time the play has been brought to the stage in a major production since 1998.

And if the quality of Northampton's bold, gripping and at-times devilishly funny interpretation is anything to go by, theatre audiences these last ten years have been the poorer for it.

Taking on the role that saw Maggie Smith win a best actress Oscar for her performance in the 1969 film, Anna Francolini makes for a captivating Miss Jean Brodie.

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life," Francolini's subversive teacher tells the young class in her opening address, with the intimacy of the theatre and the low-key lighting of the stage making the audience every bit as vulnerable to her spell-binding influence as the class of girls she mentors.

While the titular Miss Brodie is inarguably the leading light in every sense from her scene-stealing wrought out dramatic monologues to her loud and colourful attire, credit is also due to the four girls whose life she casts an irreversible influence over.

The group, played by Davinia Anderson (Mary), Natalie Burt (Jenny), Katie Foster-Barnes (Monica) and Jodie Taibi (Sandy) share a charming sister-like chemistry in their touchingly naive early scenes together, which is replaced by a loneliness tinged with regret of their mis-guided youth in the flash-forward scenes to their later years.

If there is one criticism it is that the script, bristling with wit and action in the first half, starts to drag a little in the more sombre scenes after the interval, with the eventual demise of Miss Jean Brodie failing to quite reach the climactic drama hinted at.

But it is only a small criticism of a production every bit as engrossing and enchanting as the Miss Jean Brodie character Muriel Spark created all those years ago.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie plays on the Royal stage at the Royal and Derngate, Northampton until Saturday, October 4.

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