The Puzzler

By G.C.

THE OLD COUNTRY by Alan Bennett

The Old Country is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma--inside cellophane. The setting is a seedy, book-infested cottage in the woods. Hilary (Alec Guinness) and his wife Bron (Rachel Kempson) potter around, she arranging flowers and he devising puzzles.

If they did not know where they were, he asks, where might they be? Scotland? Almost anywhere, he decides, including where they are: Hilary, a former high official of the British Foreign Office, is a traitor, and they are in a Russian dacha.

Yet the spiritual setting of this spare new comedy by Alan Bennett, now at London's Queen's Theater, is England and the foibles of the English. Despite their exile, Hilary and Bron are more English than those who stayed behind. She shuffles around in hearty tweeds; he frets over the decline of Lyons Teahouses.

Into this peculiar household come visitors, his sister Veronica (Faith Brook) and her husband Duff (John Phillips), a government official who tries to persuade Hilary to come back. He will have a short prison term, but his memoirs will make him rich. From that basic script Bennett unwraps his verbal puzzles.

Given the high quality of the acting, from Guinness on down, Bennett makes a pleasant afternoon outside Moscow into an amusing evening at the theater. Yet it is hard to like The Old Country more than just a little. "Hilary is Hilary watching Hilary watching Hilary," says his wife. And that is perhaps two Hilarys too many.

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