Stirling triumphs as the spy left out in the cold of post-war Britain
Plenty – the state of the (post-war) nation drama that firmly put David Hare on the map – premiered at the National in 1978, went to Broadway and has been revived in the West End. Yet it’s in Chichester that it looks most at home.
Look up into the night sky outside the theatre, let your imagination take wing and you can picture the moonlit sorties into occupied Europe that flew from Tangmere, the wartime RAF station just a few miles to the east.
The airfield was a base for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – the espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance organisation (“Churchill’s secret army”) whose agents undertook daring missions behind enemy lines.
We owe so much to those Bond-like figures, 39 of whom were women. Hare created a fictional embodiment of one such heroine – he called her Susan Traherne – but behind her stand names that we should know more readily: Christine Granville, say, who rescued colleagues from the Gestapo; or fearless, one-footed Virginia Hall, who outwitted Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon”.
Early on, we encounter Traherne in the dead of night, in 1943, in a field near Poitiers, waiting for an airdrop but stumbling on another Allied agent, who has conducted an emergency landing (denoted by a grand billowing of parachute material in Kate Hewitt’s incredibly slick revival, stylishly designed by Georgia Lowe).
Taking on a role recently played in New York by Rachel Weisz, Rachael Stirling gives us no cute, idealised
portrait of bravery: the character’s trembling need kindles reciprocal ardour in Rupert Young’s insouciantacting stranger (Codename Lazar); in their embrace lies the adrenal romance of wartime.
“The fact that you could meet someone for an hour or two and see the very best of them and then move on. Can you understand?” she tells a diplomat called Brock, whom she will later marry (to self-stultifying effect) in 1947. Her life in the next 15 years – sketched in jagged scenes that refuse to conform to a neat, linear order – is one of failure to adjust to peacetime, its dull norms, grubby compromises, its shortfall of what was expected, fought for, a phoney bounty.
The failure is a kind of personality flaw: Stirling dares us to see Susan as callous, self-centred (she brings Rory Keenan’s obliging Brock to the brink); she declaims her opinions, head tilted back, voice slightly hoarse, ungainsayable. Yet the underlying argument (in her favour) is clear and becomes pronounced during Suez, when she scandalises stuffed shirts at a diplomatic function. “Nobody will say ‘death rattle of the ruling class’,” she jeers. Britain has shrunk. She flies the flag for another kind of country, just as the play’s form looks to Continental models: Büchner’s Woyzeck, Brecht’s Mother Courage.
Stirling – whose mother, Dame Diana Rigg, played the latter role in a Hare translation at the NT in 1995 – carries the evening with not a little of her mater’s formidable strength. A busy clothes-horse, slipping between multiple attires, Traherne threatens to be a marionette for Hare’s vision, a mouthpiece for cocktail-party put-downs; it’s a battle to push her beyond two dimensions. And yet she triumphs; we see her gradually wilting, feel the gathering anguish, and then finally, heartbreakingly, rewind to a moment of sunlit optimism in liberated France. We made it through, the play reminds us, but still valuably asks, what did we make?
Until June 29. Tickets: 01243 781312; cft.org.uk