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.

In a country that is so saturated with Shakespeare, it makes sense that theatrical companies are consistently on the hunt to find ways to reimagine and ‘spice’ up his work. Many productions today employ modernized concepts in order to heighten the relatable sentiments and characters that exist within the original text. Federay Holmes and Elle Whiles’ co-directed production of As You Like It remained loyal to the original Elizabethan style that one might expect from the Globe, yet aimed to connect their production to today’s audience through the diversity of the company. This production seemed especially spurred by the mission of finding the truthful human element of Shakespeare’s words, regardless of gender, race, of ability. According to the new director of the Globe, Michelle Terry, their casting focused on the universality of the text by employing ‘a gender-blind, race-blind, disability-blind’ casting method in all of their works. However, with the large prevalence of unexpected casting choices that felt somewhat unrooted in textual significance, their choices began to feel like a forced gimmick and a demonstration of the Globe’s progressiveness rather than a genuine attempt to create an inclusive theatrical space for all actors involved in the piece.

Michelle Terry’s casting methods aim to support her mission for the theater to put particular emphasis on ensemble-driven pieces through a strong company of actors. The boldest casting decisions in As You Like It take center stage. Jack Laskey depicts the iconic Shakespearian heroine, Rosalind, and Nadia Nadarajah gave a nuanced and touching portrayal of Celia, who brought another dimension to the poetry through British Sign Language on stage. While there was more to this production of As You Like It than the casting, the most thought-provoking choices were concentrated in their notion to expand the traditional Shakespearian society and experiment with the flexibility of the text through the bodies on stage.

While Jack Laskey’s performance of Rosalind did have endearing moments which illuminated the text for today’s audiences, the power of Rosalind’s powerful character arc was less nuanced when portrayed by a male actor. When Rosalind subverts the expectations of her rigid society, dresses as Ganymede, and instructs Orlando on how to be a more attentive partner, there should be a palpable sense of danger that Rosalind is speaking utterly out of her assigned societal boundaries. The bravery of Rosalind to disguise herself as Ganymede and the male transformation itself lost all of their power in Laskey’s performance. In fact, while watching the production during the Ganymede scenes, it was easy to forget that Rosalind had ever been a female character in this particular production. Laskey looked and felt far more comfortable on stage in the male incarnation of Rosalind than he did in either the opening or closing segments, dressed in Rosalind’s female garb. Laskey’s performance gave the production an aspect of historical authenticity, as a young man would have originally played Rosalind. However, in the current state of the theatrical and performing arts, large theater companies are no longer in the position to give leading female characters with agency to men in order to heighten realism of ancient practices. By taking this role away from an actress, the Globe has comfortably reinstated the position of power to a man in this production and simultaneously stripped all of Rosalind’s subversive agency.

Celia’s signed performance by Nadia Nadarajah brought wonderful depth and accessibility to Shakespeare’s bewildering poetry. Her infectious expressiveness with hardly any spoken word often meant that the audience could not peel their eyes from her in any scene that took part. Nadia Nadarajah was able to bring complex life to Celia as a deaf character; communicating in BSL with the other actors on stage heightened the poetic imagery of Shakespeare’s words and created literal art with the body. However, given the singular beauty of Celia’s performance, the dynamic with a male Rosalind as the speaker for the pair proved more complicated and problematic. There were various moments on stage where Rosalind’s character appears to not only be interpreting the events to Celia, but also speaking for the both of them on stage. As modern audience members, we are conditioned to pay more attention to those that are speaking on stage and Rosalind’s overwhelming vocal stage presence seemed to overshadow that of Celia’s. Although all of the characters were signing to one another and Celia understood, Rosalind often vocally expressed the actions of the scene to Celia for audience clarity. However, Rosalind’s redundant explanation of the scene to Celia felt condescending and patronizing at times. When both Rosalind and Celia were communicating with a third party, the dialogue was often given to Rosalind, which gave her most of the agency in the scene. Given that Rosalind was being portrayed by a man, this troubling relationship had greater patriarchal implications and cast a greater shadow on the entire production. By the end of the piece, all of Celia’s communication felt like it had been filtered through the male Rosalind; a Shakespearian mansplaining, of sorts.

Perhaps, the dynamic between these actors fell flat as a result of dispersed direction. Not only was the production credited as co-directed by Federay Holmes and Elle Whiles, but all actors were encouraged to be at every rehearsal even when not working on their own scenes, in order to help devise and form the artistic vision of the piece. Terry, who considers herself as primarily an actor first, values the artistic process from the point of view of the cast of actors. However, in this case, the wide variety of contributing voices was felt in a misguided notion of the artistic goals for the work on the whole.

Overall, As You Like It was bold in its attempt to push back against the rigidity that is too often associated with works of Shakespeare. Hopefully this will just be the beginning of the realization that these words are universal truths that can be spoken by anyone irrespective of the suggestions in the original works. However, the Globe still has steps to be taken in order to ensure that the casting decisions do not feel like a demonstration of progressive thought or creative concept. Future casting hopefully will not draw from the artistic integrity and power of the piece; heightening some artistic choices in order to disenfranchise different voices on stage. Instead of creating a greater sense of inclusivity, the casting of this show wound up being divisive in other ways.