The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Miss Brodie is a teacher of iron whim and blowtorch fervor. She is also an eccentric spinster whose frustrations, romanticism, spunk, pride and biological gusto are forever making her break out of the prim parochialism of a stuffy 1930s Scottish finishing school for girls. Zoe Caldwell acts up a typhoon in the title role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but is nonetheless unable to conceal that she is one character in pressing search of a play.

A clumsy Broadway adaptation by Mrs. Jay Allen of a Muriel Spark novel, the drama focuses on the havoc created by an invincibly dedicated teacher who stimulates the imaginations of adolescent girls with her own feverish fantasies of love and life. "I put old heads on young shoulders," Miss

Brodie says, with all the casual arrogance of an army sergeant addressing fresh recruits. It is hothouse precocity and not learning or wisdom that she instills. Instead of history, she maunders on about her World War I lover who died in Flanders Field the day before the Armistice. Instead of art, she lapses into erotic reveries about the sensual gratifications of Italian holidays.

Miss Brodie assures her girls that they are the "creme de la creme" and she tries to turn them into a vicarious wilderness of mirrors refracting all facets of her thwarted ego. One student is to become an intellectual, another to cultivate siren calls of the flesh, still another to be an actress. In actuality, one girl--inspired by Miss Brodie to go help Franco's forces--dies in Spain when her train is bombed, while another humiliatingly ends up in the bed of a boorish art instructor who has an unrequited yen for Miss Brodie. Eventually, poor Miss Brodie is denounced to the headmistress by one of her cliquish girls, Amy Taubin, as a Fascist and dismissed--a melodramatic device so archaic as to seem almost piquant.

Australian-born Zoe Caldwell, who was awarded a Tony for her performance in Slapstick Tragedy, camouflages the plight of a play that has said its all in the first 20 minutes by resolute diversions of voice, manner and meticulous comic timing. Unfortunately, she would rather see through, than be, Miss Brodie. She does not trust the role enough and kids it in a slyly satirical put-on instead of letting herself be consumed by it. If she had created a warped, vulnerable, fitfully valiant and perpetually self-deluded human being, playgoers might have laughed with Miss Jean Brodie and not at her, and possibly even cried.

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