The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Anna Francolini’s measured performance brings real heart and weight to what is an otherwise solid page to stage adaptation of Muriel Spark’s best-known novel.

Francolini plays Miss Jean Brodie, an unmarried schoolteacher in her prime, who is as passionate about art as she is about Mussolini and whose girls, her creme de la creme, are well informed about the death of her young lover in Flanders, but less adept at arithmetic.

Francolini fully taps into the contradictions of the character. Brodie is a woman who is admirably strong-willed and progressive in her thinking, yet also very manipulative, demanding the adoration of charges and happy to play two suitors off against one another. Laurie Sansom’s production is competently directed with a clutch of well-choreographed scenes, yet it doesn’t quite capture all of the many ambiguities of the novel and is at times rather flat.

In addition to Francolini’s potent central performance, the whole cast is on good form, especially Natalie McConnon as Sandy, the sharpest of Miss Brodie’s students and the quickest to grow up and realise the potentially damaging consequences of her teacher’s view of the world, and Jamie Newall as Mr Lowther, a man coming to terms with the fact that Miss Brodie will never belong to him in the way he would like her to.