art master in the prime of miss jean brodie

It is the plaiting together of the beguiling and the terrifying that makes Jean Brodie so fascinating. ‘Extraordinary’: Eric Kofi Abrefa and Vanessa Kirby in Julie. We should see them all shortly in the West End. Angus Wright lopes dolefully as the spurned lover Edward MacLiam entices crossly as the art teacher Nicola Coughlan is memorably grief-stricken as the bullied playmate.

She is beautifully given gleam and avidity by Rona Morison. Sandy is the person who betrays her mentor, in what might be thought a good cause. Harrower’s version and Polly Findlay’s production hover above judgment and go deep into sadness. Having been a writer, Sandy is now about to become a nun: the power of institutional life is evoked in the meshing of school and convent, with acute, suggestive Sylvestra Le Touzel as both mother superior and a headmistress who has sympathetic glimmers beneath her starch.

She ends, shrunken, on a note of terrible plaintiveness.ĭavid Harrower’s version retains Spark’s diamond-edged dialogue but recasts the narrative so that it is seen retrospectively, through the eyes of Sandy, who as a girl was famous for staring. Williams has an extra electric purr to her voice, a shimmy in her movement: it is as if underneath her marvellous red dress (hip-hugging, with three buttons aslant on the shoulder) she is stepping out of a silk slip. A teacher who lifts her pupils’ expectations – and traps them in her own dreams. Now she shimmeringly incarnates this ambiguous creature: a mixture of the alluring and the ridiculous, a woman who makes her chosen girls long to get out of their gymslips and nibble biscotti while reverencing Giotto. Anyone in doubt that she is one of the strongest and most supple of actors need only glance at her range – from her impeccable Wallis Simpson in The Crown to her magnificent Clytemnestra.

Art master in the prime of miss jean brodie