The Miss Jean Brodie we fondly think we know is less the character in Muriel Spark’s 1960 breakthrough novel than the somewhat rehabilitated one in the subsequent stage and screen adaptations. We relish her ex cathedra pronouncements and self-conscious defiance of the Calvinist conventions of the 1930s Edinburgh girls’ school in which she teaches (when summoned to the headmistress’s office at 4.15, she fulminates, “She thinks to intimidate me with the use of quarter-hours!”). We see her as a subversive, an individualist who seeks to encourage the same spirit in her pupils. But this entails either ignoring, or at worst excusing as eccentricity, her solipsism, admiration for European fascism and insistence that her girls become the individuals she has prescribed them each to be.

David Harrower’s new adaptation goes back to the novel and gives us a Brodie it is far harder to forgive. We may chuckle with familiarity when Lia Williams utters her first line in that prim Morningside burr, but we quickly realise that her Brodie embodies the unpalatable aspects of the cult of personality as well as the mesmeric ones. Rona Morison, too, as Sandy the disciple who grows up, offers us unyielding and unlikeable moments as well as youthful fervour. Harrower has reinstated the novel’s flashforward structure in which schooldays scenes are punctuated by an interview with the adult Sandy, author of a book on psychology and about to enter a silent order of nuns. Director Polly Findlay chooses an austere staging: the only significant items of onstage furniture are a number of bells, which evoke both the school and the devotional routine, and bring both Protestant and Catholic theologies further into the foreground without thumping any Bibles to do so.

The resultant trade-off is inevitable. Laudable as it is to restore Spark’s original tone, the result of presenting a version with far less embraceable antagonists is that we feel the want of those embraces, preferring the figures we thought we knew. It’s not unlike encountering the original recording of a song for the first time after years of familiarity with a later cover version: we know intellectually that it’s the real thing, and we admire it immensely, but in our secret hearts we still cherish the makeover as The One.

Written for the Financial Times.