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Posted: Tuesday 05 July, 2011
For exactly 50 years Jean Brodie has been telling us that not only is she in her prime but that if she is given a girl at an impressionable age she is hers for life.
So, is she a great teacher, a rather pathetic spinster or actually a monster?
This powerful, beautifully constructed revival of the Muriel Spark story helps us in our decision though that, I suspect, is likely to be different for each of us.
Director Ann Garner has given her terrific cast a sweeping landscape of a stage by putting it sideways on as it were, a space that will be even bigger when the plays goes to the cliff top open air Minack Theatre in Cornwall next month.
But what she and the company have given us too is theatre and entertainment at its very, very best – I really do doubt you will see finer performances than these anywhere else this year.
And I don’t just mean the main players. To bring this play alive you need schoolgirls, lots of little girls who probably never say a word but who give us the feeling that we are at the Marcia Blaine School.
Jean Brodie famously dismisses them as the ‘corps de ballet’ but these girls are actually key players and players who, when I saw the play, never put a foot wrong.
But powerful as all the performances are, the evening does of course belong to Caroline Groom as Jean Brodie herself.
There is enough of Maggie Smith in the swinging of the shawl across the shoulder to allow those who know the story only from the film to feel very much at home but there is never any doubt that first and last she is Jean Brodie, the woman determined to put old heads on young shoulders – whatever the cost. But she is given a good run for her money by the Brodie girls as faultless in their performances as they were with their Edinburgh accents. If you are looking to spot big names of the future you might not need to look much further than Anna-Fleur Rawlinson who plays Sandy - the girl who ends up in the art teacher’s bed. A powerful performance but aided by Holly Aldous, Poppy Harrison and Maddy McGlynn.
Joanna Bowman’s portrayal of the long suffering headmistress Miss Mackay is beautifully understated. The merest twitch of the lips as she finally has Jean Brodie in her net is a triumph. But if you blink you will miss it.
Wonderful, wonderful stuff. You may count it the best £10 you spend this year.
- Christopher Hansford, Bath Chronicle 5/7/11
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Muriel Spark’s 1930s school scandal is the latest bold production choice of Bath community theatre aces Next Stage, a troupe for whom no play is ever too heavily -accented (here, Edinburgh), sexually forthright (some sensitively handled teacher-pupil action) or intellectually rigorous (what is education for?). This show’s off to Cornwall’s Minack Theatre this summer and tourists there had better not be expecting an easy romp. At almost three hours, Jay Presson Allen’s 1966 stage adaptation could use some trimming – that said, there is nary a duff note amongst the performances. Caroline Groom’s Brodie follows in the brittle, otherworldly, fine-boned tradition of Maggie Smith and Geraldine McEwan – whilst also carrying a touch of the Gwyneth Paltrows. Richard Matthews conveys brilliantly washed-up braggadocio as art teacher and suitor Teddy Lloyd, partly through a gruff, gargles-with-whisky Brian Cox (the other one)-style burr. But it’s the teenage ‘crème de la crème’ – Brodie’s elite squadron of impressionable swots – who own the stage. Of the alternating casts, tonight’s sees Anna-Fleur Rawlinson well cast as pert, determined Sandy, while Maddy McGlynn handles the doomed Mary MacGregor’s stammer and sweet naivety in a superbly unshowy fashion. Poppy Harrison’s Monica is infectiously funny, her comic skills lending much-needed levity to this dark, unsettling material. A+ to director Ann Garner for her work, not only in guiding her cast (and their parents!) through some challenging scenes, but also for a myriad of small details: the mass shoulder slump in the opening history lesson is lovely. (Anna Britten, Venue Magazine) ***