Show Business: The Grail Came Parcel Post

There is plenty to cheer in Kate Nelligan 's acting in Plenty

The way most actors tell it, success is the Holy Grail, achieved only after pain, struggle and years spent waiting on tables between auditions. Kate Nelligan, on the other hand, has to think of other conversational gambits. To her the Grail came parcel post, wrapped in bright holiday paper and crowned with a bow the size of a best-acting award. She has, in short, never had to pant after a part and rarely received so much as an unkind word from a reviewer. What she has experienced is the acclaim of the London critics, and after her new play, David Hare's Plenty, opened off-Broadway in October, almost embarrassingly ecstatic reviews in New York as well.

This week, when Plenty opens at Broadway's Plymouth Theater, there will doubtless be more gushing. Though the play has flaws, Nelligan seemingly has none. Her performance is so unique, mesmerizing and shattering at the same time, that it is hard to imagine anyone else in the role. She plays Susan Traherne, who as a girl of 17 was dropped behind German lines in France to work as a British courier. The character is never able to recapture the purity of her wartime zeal. As the play follows her through the next 20 years, shifting backward and forward through time, her personality hardens into madness, and she brings ruin not only to herself but her husband, who is movingly played by Edward Herrmann.

"It's a great role," says Nelligan.

"Susan has great power and is one of the most truly glamorous characters in the world, very sexy but saying to the world, 'If you touch me, I'll kill you.' Four years ago, when I was 27 and doing the part in London, I overplayed the power. I now allow more light in the power and permit myself early scenes. You tend to carry things lighter as you get older."

One of the keys to Nelligan as an actress, says Joseph Papp, whose Public Theater brought Plenty to the U.S., is her "tremendous self-confidence," and that, apparently, is something she has always had. Brought up in London, Ont., where her father worked for the city parks system, she seems to have been bottle-fed selfesteem. "There were six children," she says. "But my mother always made me feel that I would do something important, which stood me in good stead." She cannot remember a time when she did not work hard, and when she was only 16, she entered the University of Toronto. That is where she discovered the theater.

As Nelligan describes it, there was no flash of light when she first stood on a stage, no epiphany or dreams of glory. Just the opposite: she was comfortable. "I didn't feel elated or ecstatic, just at home." She wanted to stay in such a pleasant place—the theater, that is. In her second year, she auditioned for London's Central School of Speech and Drama, which was seeing applicants at Yale. She was accepted, but then ran into a problem: insufficient funds.