The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie review – Muriel Spark’s extraordinary heroine made more extraordinary still

Gayle Rankin is funny, sharp-tongued and sexually forthright as Vicky Featherstone’s production ditches 1930s starchiness for the bohemian avant garde

Jean Brodie has entered the classroom of Mr Lowther (Brian Ferguson). She tells the music teacher she will not be a distraction. “Proceed as if I wasn’t here,” she says.

Yeah, right. Nothing can proceed as if Jean Brodie was not there. Played by Gayle Rankin in a drape-sleeved top and figure-hugging leather skirt, she is impossible to ignore. Chloe Lamford’s dust-pink set is a little bit lecture theatre, an awful lot neo-classical staircase; Rankin floats across it like an exotic moth: colourful, distractable, ever present.

Pupils and teachers loathe or love her. You never doubt why. She is compellingly herself.

In a re-defining performance, Rankin makes Muriel Spark’s extraordinary heroine more extraordinary still. In Vicky Featherstone’s production for the Royal Lyceum and the National Theatre of Scotland, she is funny, sharp-tongued and sexually forthright. Out goes 1930s starchiness, in comes the bohemian avant garde. She slips off her zebra-striped heels and walks in bare feet.

Her singularity comes at a cost. Headteacher Miss Mackay (Maureen Beattie) is worried about educational attainment: today, we would be more concerned about child protection. Brodie’s approval of the predatory art teacher Mr Lloyd (Dyfan Dwyfor) is only one of her contradictions.

Those contradictions keep us guessing. To be enamoured of Italian art and European fashion is one thing; to admire Mussolini is another. Her elitism would be at home in an Ayn Rand novel were it not for Spark’s political nous and ironic wit, crisply captured here in David Harrower’s adaptation.

On the one hand, we might like her rationality and reason, her desire to create “young heroines of the future” and her amusing distaste for team spirit. On the other, we worry about an individualism that threatens not only this prim school, but society at large. She is at once inspirational and messianic.

Only the teenage Sandy Stranger (Bobby Rainsbury) sees through her. The younger woman brings her down as if Brodie were a Shakespearean hero – an obstinate King Lear or Coriolanus, too damaged by her private losses to see her own flaws. She wants to shape a generation in her likeness; her tragedy is to end up just another teacher. In our age of charismatic leaders, Featherstone’s bold, free-flowing, sometimes overstated production has lessons of its own.

• At Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 18 October; on tour until 7 November.