WEAK BRITISH IMPORTS

...As scripted by Shaffer, directed by Michael Kahn and performed by George Hearn, he is neither funny nor mysterious...

...And the characters' entrances seem to establish the right mood for a parody or farce-although we soon find out this mystery takes itself seriously...

...Andrew Jack-ness' set is beautifully suggestive, a perfect specimen of the old English manor house library that hosts the best old English sleuth stories...

...Hare's sketchy re-creation of Susan's ordeal in France, regardless of the writer's intention, certainly offers no clue...

...A clever reversal of situation is appropriate in this sort of drama, but that should not require an hour of tedious explication beforehand (especially when the playwright compares himself favorably to Agatha Christie in a narrative voiceover piped through the theater's speaker system...

...Edward Herrmann, George N. Martin and Bill Moor are particularly effective in portraying three types of British diplomats, and an actress who calls herself Johann Carlo is quite intriguing in the role of a young woman who earns a living as a model for body painters...

...To make matters worse, the best thing about this play is revealed the moment the curtain opens...

...Unless the playwright means, then, to infer that Susan could never get over being deprived of the "excitement" of her youth, his use of dramatic contrast begins to seem rather devious...

...Hare, as his title suggests, is chiefly interested in voicing a social and political comment on England's era "of peace and plenty," and his leading female is important to him solely as an instrument for lifting the lid on the nation's corruption and hypocrisy...

...The opening is badly marred by its failure to explain how or why Susan found herself in this tremendously dangerous situation...

...Gordon Chater clowns hilariously as the butler, a gentleman simultaneously thoroughly proper and totally incompetent...

...The play is organized into 12 episodes...

...It is hard to imagine that nobody involved with the production perceived the absolute necessity of at least hinting at a surprise before the intermission so that the public might go to the lobby speculating about solutions other than the one marked "Exit...

...Moreover, because each strand is meant to shed light on the other, neither is adequately explored in its own right...

...Some French teenagers did serve as Resistance couriers, but I never heard of the British parachuting a high school girl behind Wehrmacht lines for such taxing and delicate duty...

...Anthony Shaffer had gone ahead with his original plan to publish a drugstore mystery novel called The Case of the Oily Levantine, instead of turning the same material into a play with the nonsensically misspelled title of Whodunnit, the volume would probably have landed in the proverbial wastebasket without anybody reading beyond the first half...

...We first meet the heroine, Susan Traherne (Kate Nelligan), in 1943 as a 17-year-old courier for the French underground...

...At one point, her friend Alice (Ellen Parker) demonstrates considerable experience in handling a rather complicated looking Middle Eastern hashish pipe...

...Perhaps Shaffer had some last-minute doubts about his talent as a mystery writer, for just before Whodunnit opened he told an interviewer that the play is "more a comedy than at hriller...

...This brief rally, however, is an insufficient payoff for its overlong setup-an entire first act that is unbelievably childish as a mystery and utterly boring as a play...

...On the one hand, Hare wishes to treat a young English woman's struggle to adjust to normal life after the shattering experience of working with the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France...

...Nelligan's American debut is a memorable theatrical event...

...The flashback that serves as epilogue is still more disorienting...

...John Gunther's sets, if not the most attractive, do help make the frequent leaps of locale less confusing...

...She is fascinatingly intense on stage, yet retains a degree of control that seems positively coldblooded...

...The portrait of Susan back at home is also less than fully believable, mostly because she evokes the late 1960s far more than her own supposed era...

...One expects most mystery novels to be bad, and a paperback is a lot cheaper than a ticket to Broadway...

...Despite Shaffer's attempt to intensify the suspense by adding one more murder toward the end, I don't remember having seen or read a mystery that made me less eager to find out whodunit...

...So, Hare abruptly insists, Susan came out of the War healthy and forward-looking, ready to live and love...

...Hare's work is impressive in some ways, and at times quite thought provoking...

...The most unpleasant aspect of Whodunnit is Shaffer's heavy-handedness in trying to convince the audience that there is in fact a puzzle worth unraveling, and that in the end he will provide the at once surprising and logical solution...

...On Stage WEAK BRITISH IMPORTS BY LEO SAUVAGE would be wonderful if, midway through a Broadway season that has offered few occasions for satisfaction, let alone enthusiasm, David Hare's Plenty delivered what it promises...

...The rest of the cast are excellent, too...

...Both women seem closer to the rebels seemingly bent on rebellion for its own sake who came to the forefront in several Western countries during the Vietnam War, not after World War II...

...The main problem arises from the playwright's unsuccessful attempt to integrate two quite different subjects...

...Less winning is the "oily Levantine" himself...

...After witnessing, in episode 11, the depressing culmination of Susan's journey through the '50s and early '60s, we are returned to August 1944 and invited to leave the theater with the image of a glowing young spirit in the newly liberated French countryside...

...Still, it would have been less of a disappointment than what we are served up at the Biltmore Theater...

...His loudspeaker voice is the most transparent and obnoxious possible device, challenging us to look for the right clues and follow the correct line of reasoning, as if the evening had been arranged by an expert whose mastery we have to take for granted...

...I couldn't tell...

...The evening is not without compelling moments, and nobody is likely to be bored-notwithstanding a few unfortunate sequences when the author, with the hardly shocking clarity of hindsight, passes judgment on real historical events like the bungled 1956 Suez expedition...

...His style is satirical, offering bitter and sometimes forceful observations on politicians, diplomats, and the rest of the British gentlemen who kept a stiff upper lip and pretended to uphold traditional values...

...In doubling as director, Hare does little to compensate for Plenty's cumbersome episodic structure...

...Unfortunately, this character also perfectly contributes to the play's vintage 1968 drugs and dregs atmosphere...

...On the other, he wants to examine the difficulties any independently-minded English girl might have encountered in adapting to the climate of tedious, ineffectual conformity that suddenly descended on her country in the post-war years...

...All the same, a play that allows its main character to wander around without credible motivation can at best be deemed good, not great...

...Yet it ultimately falls short of being the truly accomplished piece of theater it obviously strives to be...

...That qualification does not extend to my appreciation of Plenty's star...

...Shaffer's resourcefulness disappears as quickly as it arrives, and the rest of the second act comes close to replaying the rigmarole of the first...

...In addition, Hare introduces a misleading and unexplained digression when another British parachutist confiscates an unidentified airlifted box from a French fighter, even though the parcel's arrival had been duly announced in the code used by the BBC for communicating with the partisans...

...What has happened...

...Good performances are turned in by Hermione Baddeley as an "eccentric archaeologist," Barbara Baxley as a "dotty aristocrat" and Lauren Thompson as a "sweet young thing...

...For those who pay the price, there is some compensation in the first 20 minutes of the second act, where the author unexpectedly produces an ingenious turnabout...

...Since Hare never establishes a convincing link between the two themes, he ends up with no justification for including the first one at all...

...Actually, it is only Kate Nelligan's tremendous performance that makes Susan the unquestionable focus of the play...

...Her breakdown cannot, after all, be traced to the terror of that time...

...I cannot imagine what kind of enjoyment one might derive from Whodunnit, but I will abide by the rule and say nothing about the good 20 minutes...

...It does not...

...As is customary, the Playbill reminds us not to disclose the plot out of consideration for "the enjoyment of future audiences...

...Although the play, transplanted to the Plymouth Theater after an opening run off-Broadway at Joseph Papp's Public Theater, is by far 1982-83's best drama to date, that fact simply underlines the extreme poverty of the competition...

...We leave her in England in 1962 reduced to an irresponsible, unbalanced misfit...

...Scenes from the Resistance days, set in an anonymous village, begin and end the play...

...The effect is so mesmerizing that as we watch we believe her character to be one of substance, and second thoughts come to mind only after the curtain has dropped...

...He devises no smoother method of shifting from one scene to another than darkening the stage and covering the change with Nick Bicat's familiar sounding incidental music...

...It is almost impossible to accept that Susan Traherne could have lived in such a milieu in the sedate British '50s...