When audiences know a story as well as they think they know Jean Brodie’s it can be tricky for new productions to feel fresh, especially when what audiences know is through secondary adaptations of Muriel Spark’s original novella.

Part of Richard Baron’s achievement here, in what is by any standards a classy production, is overcoming that challenge. I found myself understanding more fully than before the desperation of the Edinburgh schoolmistress in her prime, and the reasons why Sandy, her best-loved protegée and her Judas, betrays her. On the other hand, there are still parts of Helen Logan’s performance in the title role that look as if they are too much in thrall to what has gone before.

In essence, if you have previously thought of Brodie as some kind of arch comedy of manners, albeit with a dark twist at the end, prepare to meet Brodie as full-blown tragedy in this adaptation by Jay Presson Allen. Miss Brodie is our heroic figure, a charismatic, inspirational teacher; her “set” of young girls, the “crème de la crème”, are indeed fortunate to be introduced as much to the wonders of risotto (this is the 1930s after all) as to those of Giotto.

Her fatal flaw may be partly pride but it is also just being a woman; the hideous rule at the time that prevented a married woman from being a teacher is her agony, and I choose the word advisedly. Baron puts the religious iconography on the fringes of the novel (and in Spark’s own life) centre stage.

In an extraordinary climactic penultimate scene, a kind of fantasy sequence after Sandy has denounced Brodie to the headmistress and seen her dismissed, Brodie is laid, Christ-like, against the foot of Jenny, the one of the set who Brodie has predicted will be “famous for sex” but who is wearing the blue mantle of the Madonna, in a pose copied from a thousand Renaissance Pietas, all to the dying chords of La traviata.

Is Logan’s Brodie worthy of this elevation? For my money, her early scenes are far too histrionic, like a camp old windmill forever waving her arms about and with a strangulated Edinburgh accent that would make Stanley Baxter blush. But by the end, betrayed, defeated, and, as Baron clearly sees it, crucified, she achieves a very real dignity.

Altogether, it’s a fascinating and well-drilled affair that grows in the telling. Irene Allan turns in another fine performance as Sandy; Dougal Lee is excellent as the randy but equally desperate art teacher Mr Lloyd.

Box office 01796 484626, to Oct 15

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