The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at the Donmar Warehouse directed by Polly Findlay did not allow the audience to sit back, relax, and happily predict which characters they would be rooting for from start to finish. Jean Brodie, portrayed by Lia Williams, first appears on stage as the beloved and charismatic student-favorite teacher at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. She sneaks her rebellious teaching methods behind the back of uptight Mrs. McKay, played by Sylvestra Le Touzel. However, the performances of Jean Brodie and Mrs. McKay in this particular production complicated the notion of straightforward characters and, instead, caused the audience to consistently question whether the story was centered around the right person. The acting styles of both actresses and contrasting design of both characters supported the religious conflict in the text to create a theatrical experience that constantly made the audience wonder why they might be rooting for the “high-strung one” by the bows.

While Miss Brodie begins the play telling quippy jokes and entertains her five young students with stories of her travels to Italy, Williams’ energy and charm is intoxicating. She is dawned in a bright red dress which perfectly complements her red hair and lipstick. She appears as the only bright color on the entire stage amongst the students’ dark uniforms and the entire gray set of the school. Williams portrays Brodie with a seductive lilt to her voice, which makes every one of her lines sound like a secret she’s letting you in on. It is tempting to immediately side with her, as the girls do. Mrs. McKay is painted as the enemy that Brodie must hide her whimsical ways from- she believes the girls should be learning the material that will be on their national school exams that Brodie has continually put on the back burner. Brodie believes that the classroom and the imagination should be intertwined, feeding into the free spirits of the children while McKay has a more traditional mindset. However, while it is initially easy to box these characters into the ‘fun’ character and the ‘strict’ character, subtle clues in the text make the audience rethink their possible first impressions of these seemingly foil characters.

At a moment in time between the World Wars, Miss Brodie speaks of her visits to Italy with the girls with reverence for Mussolini and Fascism as a potential way to solve issues of poverty in Edinburgh. Although this may be an initial red flag for some audience members, it is also safe to assume that Brodie did not have full knowledge of where Fascism and Nazism were heading. Later on, however, when one of her students, Sandy, is kissed by the art teacher, Brodie is upset because the art teacher made a lover of Sandy and not a different one of her students. Once it dawns on the audience that Brodie could possibly be setting up her underage students with faculty members of the school, the seemingly sunshiny impression we once had of her is now tainted. The elements of Williams’ performance that were once endearing become quite grating toward the end of the show. Her inability to adopt a serious tone of voice becomes infuriating, especially given the weighty topics she is tackling. By the end of the play, Brodie’s carefree and imaginative optimism toward her students becomes her downfall, as she convinces Joyce Emily to follow her brother to war- only allowing her to march to her own death.

However, the production dramatizes Brodie’s flaws and inability to initiate self-aware change in her behavior over the course of the play. In one of the most dramatic physical transformations on stage, we see Brodie dying as a frail cancer patient in the final scene. In what the audience would expect as a self-realization moment, Brodie is still blames all of her faults on the girls, while taking full responsibility for their successes. The production is able to demonstrate that a character can experience a complete physical arc, without experiencing any emotional growth throughout the play. Brodie begins and ends the play in the exact same way although physically she begins as a force of life and ends as someone who is deteriorating.

In contrast, Le Touzel paints Mckay as an uptight stereotype of a school principle who preaches slogans like “Safety First” while Brodie preaches “Goodness, Truth and Beauty.” However, given the result at the end of the play, McKay’s pragmatic approach does not seem out of place and is, conversely, her responsibility to keep the girls safe. McKay wants the girls to do as well in school as they possibly can, so that they can be self-sufficient. While Brodie’s vision of freedom for her students is pushing them into the arms of men that can take care of them, McKay underscores the importance of education to ensure that they never have to rely on a man to take care of them. Sure, McKay’s idea of school is less fun, but at the end of the day, she’s doing her job and all of her students may have stayed alive.

The stand off between Brodie and McKay reflects larger religious tension present in the play between Calvinism and Catholicism. The traditional McKay trying to absolve the young girls from sin and supporting the institution of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls personifies Calvinist beliefs. She sees Brodie as sexually liberated, lacking virtue and work ethic, all of which were concerns that Calvinists expressed about Catholic immigrants into Scotland. While Brodie is only expressly against Calvinism- her presence in the play aims to show the dichotomy and strain between the two faiths at the time in Edinburgh. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Findlay artfully questions the notion of honest and corrupt characters through her strong female leads in order to dramatize the flaws of seeing one particular faith as wholly virtuous or sinful.