WHAT’S THE STORY?

IT was 50 years ago today that Scotland’s greatest novelist of the 20th century, Muriel Spark, awoke to read rave reviews of the Broadway play adapted from her 1961 novel The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie. She was living in Rome at the time and the stage production and subsequent film – plus the boost to the book’s own sales –helped make her financially independent.

The reason why the play was so important is because the famous film starring Maggie Smith as Brodie was based on the play and its interpretation of the novel, rather than being taken straight from the book.

The American stage and film writer Jay Presson Allen had seen the potential of the novel as a play several years previously. Before writing the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, starring Tippi Hedren and Edinburgh’s own Sean Connery, she completed the first draft in three days.

After Marnie came out in 1964, Allen got back to work on the play and in 1966 it was produced on the London stage – after a try-out in Torquay – with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role.

It opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End on May 6, 1966, and among the co-stars as one of the Brodie Set was Olivia Hussey who would go on to star in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

It was Redgrave who gained all the plaudits, however: “A performance that is already passing into legend,” wrote critic Hilary Spurling.

HOW GOOD WAS THE PLAY?

WE will do our readers the courtesy of accepting that they are familiar with the film or novel or both. And if not, why not, as it’s one of the great works of Scottish literature?

The first thing to note is that this play was not a straightforward interpretation of Spark’s novel. Among other changes, the play reduced the number of Brodie Set girls from six to four, and did not use the novel’s experimental “flash forward” passages except for scenes showing Sandy as Sister Helena. Characters were conflated and there was a different slant on the emotional and political themes.

The play was a success in both London and New York, where it ran for almost a year, possibly because Allen’s adaptation was perfectly suited to the stage and missed out some key experimental elements of the novel while emphasising others. Most importantly Allen took a filmic approach to writing the play as she hoped to write a screenplay from it, as turned out to be the case.

Its run in London was finished some time before the Broadway version opened on January 16, 1968, to glowing reviews.

WHO STARRED IN IT?

REDGRAVE turned down the role on Broadway (and the film version) because, as she later admitted, she was growing uneasy about playing an admirer of fascism while her own socialist beliefs were firming up. In stepped Zoe Caldwell, already a lauded actress on the Broadway stage, who received rave reviews for her performance.

The play featured in William Goldman’s terrific non-fiction work about Broadway called The Season in which he was kind to the production – one of the few he gave pass marks to, largely for Caldwell’s performance. He wrote: “Any actress who plays this role is going to get screams at the final curtain”, and so it proved. Caldwell won her second Tony best actress award – of four in total – but by then filming had already started on the movie.

The remarkable thing about the film of “Prime” is that Maggie Smith was not the first choice of the producers, who wanted a big-name screen actress. After Redgrave, they approached Helensburgh-born Deborah Kerr, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews before Smith gained the role that won her an Oscar and set her on the road to damehood.

IT HELPED TO MAKE SPARK FINANCIALLY INDEPENDENT?

THE relationship between Spark and Allen was difficult, to say the least, but Spark was always grateful for the monetary boost the play gave her.

Her friend and biographer Alan Taylor, whose book Appointment In Arezzo about his relationship with Spark is already in to its third print run, maintains it was the attention gained by the play that prompted Spark’s move from New York to Rome in 1967.

Taylor explains: “She was the centre of attention which she disliked because it detracted from her time for writing. She always called Jean Brodie her milch cow, a lottery win that kept on giving and which enabled her to live her life as she wished.”

HOW IS SPARK’S CENTENARY PROGRESSING?

IT’S fast approaching the centenary of her birth on February 1. On January 31, the biggest celebration of her life to date will take place in the Usher Hall and it is selling out quickly. Hosted by Taylor and his partner Rosemary Goring, star turns such as Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company and a special surprise guest should make it a night to remember.