Lost Valor

By T.E. Kalem

PLENTY by David Hare

Ever since John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, young British dramatists of envenomed wit and mocking disillusionment have spewed unpent rage across the English stage. In some ways, they sing an elegy in a graveyard--a threnody of lost nerve, lost confidence and a lost imperial destiny. In the foreground are eroded ideals, ill-spent passions and the taste of ashes that flavors lives without a guiding purpose.

Britain's David Hare, 35, offers all of that, and something more. At the heart of Plenty is a strange, beautiful, demonically incandescent woman. A twin to Hedda

Gabler, she finds her own existence claustrophobic and the society around her contemptible. "I like to lose control," she announces enigmatically. She can fire off a pistol in a drawing room to scare the wits out of people, and in the course of Plenty, she loses her own.

When Susan Traherne (Kate Nelligan) was 17, she served as a courier with the French Resistance. It struck a harmonic chord of valor that haunts her during the rest of her frustrating life. In flashbacks and flashforwards, Plenty ranges from World War II through the '50s and '60s. Back in London, Susan blurs into the social canvas, drifting in and out of jobs, romances, causes, too self-indulgent and too undisciplined to harness her energies to her high self-expectations.

Through Susan's ardent temperament and acerbic tongue, Hare has his say on the duplicities of politics, the hypocrisies of business and the corruptive universal worship of Mammon. When Susan enters a loveless match with a middle-level diplomat (Edward Herrmann), Hare seizes his chance to lay down a carnal barrage on a Foreign Office bureaucracy requiring 6,000 men to dismantle an empire that it took 600 men to govern.

As Susan's husband, Herrmann makes a proper and a touching saint out of a Milquetoast. But no one could fully compete with Kate Nelligan. She steals the evening and puts it in her purse. This Canadian-born actress makes a coruscating New York debut. Her moods are mercurial, and her stage presence is formidable. In this vehicle of trenchant thought, wry polemics and caustic wit, she is the powerful engine of internal combustion. --By T.E. Kalem

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