Show and Tell Post # 1

For my show and tell I chose the play, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (hope this was acceptable). Anyway, the play is a  British drama based on the novel of the same name written by Muriel Spark in 1961. Which was later adapted into a play by Jay Pressen Allen. Since then the play has been interpreted into a film which debuted in 1969 with Dame Maggie Smith playing the main role of Jean Brodie for which she won the Academy Award.  All three iterations of the story shared international acclaim and continued to be successful even enjoying a stint on Broadway in 1966 in which Zoe Caldwell starred in the main role and went on to win the Tony Award for her performance. More recently the play has been making a bit of a comeback and in 2005, the novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. In 1998, the ranked The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie #76 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

So the play takes place in Edinborough Scotland in the early 1930's and focuses on a teacher named Jean Brodie who is as she would say, "In her Prime". Miss Brodie is in her early 40's and has a over active sex drive that projects itself into her everyday teachings and personality. She is also an admirer of the fascist dictators Benito Mussolini and Francesco Franco in which she romanticizes their actions to her students. This becomes projected out to her pre-pubescent students as well, becoming a part of her everyday teachings essentially affecting the girls lives as well. There are four girls in particular that Ms. Brodie goes out of her way to "groom" them up into being little carbon copies of herself, making them emulate her actions and thoughts. This quickly becomes a problem when the school's head mistress Mrs. Mackay starts to pick up on the negative impact that Miss Brodie is having on her students. Eventually we come to find out that Miss Brodie is involved with a married man named Teddy Lloyd, who is her ex-lover and an art teacher in the senior section of the school. Mr. Lloyd is still very much obsessed with Miss Brodie, so much so that he paints portraits of her constantly in order to keep his passion at bay. Also, Jean catches the eye of music teacher/church choirmaster Gordon Lowther, in which she and the wind up spending a lot of time at his home in Cramond, a seaside village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Throughout the whole affair Miss Brodie will sometimes spend the night with Mr. Lowther and keeps it a secret to everyone else. Mr. Lowther wants them to get married, but Brodie will not commit to him, this will eventually cause Mr. Lowther to leave her and marry the chemistry teacher Miss Lockheart. As the girls get older into their teenage years we see Miss Brodie starting to manipulate the girls into doing her will, in order to live out her own fantasies vicariously through them. Later in the play Miss Brodie trys to set events in motion that will entice Mr. Lloyd into  having an affair with one of her more "mature" students, named Jenny. Throughout this time she uses another student named Sandy to spy on  Jenny and Mr. Lloyd in order to eventually catch them in the act. However, it is actually Sandy, who has become very increasing spiteful towards Miss Brodie and Jenny (for her beauty), who eventually incites an affair with Mr. Lloyd. Eventually Sandy calls off the affair when she discovers Mr. Lloyds obsession with Miss Brodie is still intact. In the end we see that Miss Brodie's impact on her girls has basically started to claim lives when her most incorrigible student Mary Macgregor goes of to Spain in order to become involved in the Fascist uprising and gets killed on a train that is bombed by rebel forces. This leads to Miss Mackay's termination of Miss Brodie in which Brodie puts all the blame on poor Sandy by the end of the play calling her an "assassin" and storming out of the room. The play ends as it begins with a nun who we now know is an adult Sandy speaking with an American journalist recalling her memories of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.

I honestly chose this play because I just saw the performance at the Shaver Theatre Weds night and I wanted to support our theatre department's production by saying some positive words about the play, that and well, it's the first play I've seen in quite a while :). Anyway, the performances were wonderful but honestly, I am kind of on the fence about this play. The subject matter is morally questionable, I'm not a prude, but I also don't agree with underage sexual abuse, consensual or not, it's not something I take lightly. So I find it hard to stomach a play about a character that instigates these actions amongst her highly impressionable female students. Anyway, that being said, I do think that it is important to note that Spark specifically chose to make these students very young to begin with because it sets up the creepy/morally wrong vibe throughout the show and it definitely gives the audience a strong idea of how twisted the adult characters both Jean Brodie and Teddy Lloyd are. I find this interesting because Spark could have strayed away from being controversial but instead opted to take the route that he know would affect the reader(eventually the audience) more personally and that shows how strong of an impact a dramaturgical choice can have.
Sequence is also important in this play because again, it establishes a time frame in which these events are happening. It's important to know when the interactions with Mr. Lloyd are happening with both Jenny and Sandy due to the fact that they were nine years old when the play begins. If the audience or reader is unsure of the age of these girls when he begins painting them and making sexual advances towards them then society might revolt against the play. It's interesting that just due to the fact that time passes and the girls are older, it becomes slightly more acceptable that they are being painted nude by an older man. Whereas had these events taken place only a few years earlier this book/show might have been deemed unsuitable for society consumption. This just confirms how important a writer's or playwright's choice to establish a time frame/sequence of events makes a huge difference in a play, especially when dealing with such strong subject matter.