Theatre in Review: Plenty (The Public Theater)

	Mike Iveson, Rachel Weisz. Photo: Joan Marcus

In his 1978 drama, Plenty, David Hare gave us one of the most fascinating -- and disturbing -- heroines in modern dramatic literature. When we first meet Susan Traherne, we can't be sure she hasn't murdered the naked man lying comatose on the floor, his body splattered with blood. In fact, he is her husband, numbed by whiskey and Nembutal; the blood is from a minor accident, and she is walking out on him for good. "Tell him I left with nothing that was his," she says to a friend, to whom she has handed the keys to her marital home in Knightsbridge.

That scene is set in 1962. Immediately the action flashes back to France in 1943, and Susan, barely an adult, is working as a courier for the resistance. Waiting for a much-needed weapons drop, she encounters a British soldier who has parachuted in on a mission of his own, far from his intended destination. Offering him assistance, she provides a cool assessment of her job, which is to "keep [the Germans] here, keep them occupied. Blow up their bridges, devastate the roads, so they have to waste their manpower chasing us. Divert them from the front." The paradox, she adds, is "the more successful you are, the longer it goes on." (She has no illusions about the fact that the British and Gaullist French sometimes work at cross-purposes.) Then she bursts into tears, confessing her fears for herself and for a confederate who has been shipped off to Buchenwald.

The same combination of nerve, brains, and hysteria will inform Susan's life as she spends the postwar years slipping into an extended dark night of the soul; having spent the war on a knife's edge of danger, risking her life for a better world, the banality and materialism of British life in the 1950s constitutes a devastating disappointment. As the years go by and she can find no use for her considerable intelligence and passion, she turns increasingly self-destructive, taking down with her Raymond Brock, the diplomat who loves her and stands by her at considerable cost to his career.

Speaking for herself and her fellow partisans, Susan, on holiday in Brussels, says, "We get rather restless back in England; the people who stayed behind seem childish and a little silly." That's putting it mildly, as she tries repeatedly to fit into a postwar England being reshaped by a socialist government, a consumer culture, and an empire in precipitous decline. A job working in a shipping office exists largely as a vehicle for Susan to satirize her supervisor's clumsy harassments. ("I came in one morning and found the partition gone. I interpret it as the first step in a mating dance.") A career in advertising predictably proves to be a failure; copywriting, she avers, "is simply a question of pitching my intelligence low enough. Shutting my eyes and imaging what it's like to be very, very stupid." Her work on the 1951 Festival of Britain -- a real-life event designed to jump-start the UK's economy and creative culture -- is notable largely for introducing Mick, whom she chooses to father her child. (Indicating that she doesn't want to marry any man she already knows, she says, "I'm afraid I'm rather strong-minded... with them I usually feel I'm holding myself in for fear of literally blowing them out of the room.") The effort at conception is a failure, and Mick, pathetically obsessed with her, stalks her until she dismisses him with a gun.

Susan's on-and-off affair with Brock culminates in marriage, but she is almost laughably unfit for the role of diplomat's spouse, a fact vividly illustrated at a dinner party held on the eve of the Suez Crisis, that exercise in British duplicity that ended with the country's global humiliation. "Nobody will say 'death rattle of the ruling class'," she says, mock helpfully, to Brock's boss, Darwin, before launching into what her friend Alice calls "a sort of psychiatric cabaret," leaving her guests in stunned, embarrassed silence as she denounces a society that provides material plenty yet is crippled by repression and lack of purpose.

This scene, which ends the first act, is, arguably, the key to the play, as it signals the moment when Susan's rage breaks its boundaries, sending her on a path of self-destruction. How the actress playing Susan handles it will, in some ways, define the entire production. The much-missed Kate Nelligan, in one of the most astounding performances I've ever seen (at the Public in 1982), gave it an enormous authority and a world-shaking rage; her Susan was a superior being, rendering a dire verdict on a fallen world. Cate Blanchett, in the West End in 1999, made the scene an occasion for an unnervingly real depiction of nervous collapse.

In David Leveaux's new production, Rachel Weisz's approach is conspicuously smaller; you feel the full force of Susan's scorn, but you don't get the sense that a fundamental belief has been shattered, a rip made in her psychic fabric that can't be repaired. That's not to say Weisz doesn't have many effective moments; the actress is thoroughly conscientious about charting Susan's descent, especially in the second act, whether coolly lending money for an abortion to an adolescent she barely knows, confronting a highly placed diplomat about Brock's stalled career and making a dire threat if he isn't promoted, or seeking out the airman from that field in France, now a self-loathing business-and-family man, for a sordid one-night stand in a cheap Blackpool hotel.

What Weisz doesn't do is make Susan's raging dissatisfaction anything bigger than itself. This is a major problem, because Susan is the lens through which we view the changes reshaping Britain, all of which happen offstage. (Interestingly, Hare tells us nothing about Susan's past; it's as if her character has been fully formed by her wartime experiences.) There's a mystery at her center; her criticisms of British society are stingingly accurate, but given the chaos that follows in her wake, she often seems monstrous. (You could argue that she is a kind of 20th-century Hedda Gabler.) Without a properly scaled performance, a play about the state of a nation can seem to be a portrait of an unstable bitch on wheels.

Still, Leveaux gets good work from several members of the supporting cast. Corey Stoll captures Brock's infinite patience with Susan as well as his wary understanding of her darker corners. ("When you talk longingly of the war, some deception usually follows," he tells her.) He also delivers the play's most devastating takedown, accurately indicting her for her cruelty and condescension toward others. Emily Bergl is first-rate as Alice, Susan's madcap friend and confidante, who drifts through a series of careers and relationships. Byron Jennings offers finely shaded work as Darwin, especially when forced to admit, in the Suez scene, that he has been betrayed by his own government. LeRoy McClain is a figure both attractive and tragic as Mick, who clings desperately to Susan long after he has been dismissed by her for being useless. Paul Niebanck has a fine cameo as a diplomat who kindly, but firmly, lets Susan know she has met her match.

The production benefits from Mike Britton's set, which makes interesting use of articulating walls to create a variety of locations, including parlors, offices, bedsits, and the bank of the Thames River; Jess Goldstein's costumes, which carefully parse the looks of styles separated by only a couple of years; and David Weiner's meticulous lighting, which creates a variety of interior and exterior looks. David Van Tieghem's sound design makes excellent use of musical selections and radio broadcasts -- including a BBC interview with Susan -- that help indicate the passage of time.

Aside from Shakespeare, the Public doesn't really do revivals, but Hare has a long and honorable history with the company, and, given the current state of disillusionment with Europe in particular and democracy in general, a new production of Plenty must have seemed irresistible. ("Marvelous time to be alive in Europe," Darwin says early on, a line that cuts deeply these days.) Plenty is still very much worth seeing, even in a production that doesn't realize its full potential.

The greatest disappointment is Leveaux's staging of the final scene, which flashes back to Europe on the day the war ends: we see Susan, for once, feeling optimistic, even invincible. Forever burned into my consciousness is the memory of Kate Nelligan, standing downstage and delivering one of the most haunting lines in modern drama, Susan's assertion that "there will be days and days and days like this." Here, however, Weisz, marooned upstage, more or less throws the line away. The play's final -- and most brutal -- knockout punch, is sadly muted. Susan Traherne may be a difficult, even terrible, woman, but she needs more consideration than she gets in this uneven revival. -- David Barbour