Less readily fanatical than some occupants of the role, she bustles about like a warmer (and Celtic) 1930s-style Margaret Thatcher, extolling all things Italian, whether Giotto or Mussolini. Speaking in an accent that sounds more Irish than Scottish, she resists the hyperbolic self-aggrandizement of Brodie’s credo, “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she’s mine for life.” If anything, Shaw may be too ruthless a performer to play into the florid theatrics that have always given this play its somewhat campy juice. The play is about casting a spell for which you then pay a price, and one only wishes Fiona Shaw, inheriting the role that won Zoe Caldwell a Tony and Maggie Smith an Oscar, were as mesmerizing as the part demands: Like Brodie herself, the play still beguiles, though it’s debatable on this occasion whether Shaw offers up the requisite narcissism run rampant of which students’ (not to mention an audience’s) crushes are made - and then crushed. Brodie, indeed, could be placed on a spectrum of colorful, sometimes fierce eccentrics extending from Madame Arcati right through to Peter Shaffer’s extravagant Lettice Douffet, whose motto - “Enlarge! Enlighten! Enliven!” - could be a paraphrase of Brodie’s own.
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