Leading Ladies Get Their Chance to Shine Onstage Jeanne Tanner Megan McGinnis in ""Daddy Long Legs"" at the St. James Theatre. LONDON - A national treasure takes on the National Trust at, yes, the National Theatre, and the result is Alan Bennett's most peculiar play in years. Catherine Ashmore Linda Bassett, left, Jack Chissick and Alastair Parker in ""People"" by Alan Bennett. "People," newly opened at the National's midsized Lyttelton, returns the much-venerated Mr. Bennett to the auditorium where such career-defining plays as "The Madness of George III" and "The History Boys" were premiered, and his director of choice remains Nicholas Hytner, who shepherded those earlier plays from stage to screen. But at least on first viewing, "People" seems contrastingly slight and thematically predetermined. The play will sell out, as Mr. Bennett on home turf these days always does, and his advancing years - he is now 78 - have only added to this author's status as a literary grandee. And yet, I've rarely felt before with Mr. Bennett a topic struggling to this degree to accommodate itself to a play. He's evidently angry about the commodification afoot in a country where the very notion of heritage can itself be bought. But the play itself begins as "Grey Gardens" and ends as "Lettice and Lovage," to cite two well-established titles, with a second-act detour into the farcical climes of "No Sex Please, We're British" that is very odd indeed. Marking her third Bennett play in a row, Frances de la Tour stars as Dorothy Stacpoole, a former model who inhabits a dilapidated Yorkshire manse with not much to occupy her but some decades-old newspapers and Iris, her stooped "companion." Linda Bassett sails through that role, which amounts to little more than a sustained sight gag. What will happen to this elaborate period wreck of a home, whose contents, we are told, include chamber pots of urine belonging to various notables from centuries past, Kipling and Shaw among them? The struggle for the soul of the building - and, by extension, that of a nation - survives multiple contrivances on the way to a scenic transformation that delivers up Bob Crowley's set as the show's actual star and ends the production on a much-needed high. I still don't buy the porn movie machinations that drive the second act and which aren't helped by some crucial miscasting in smaller roles. But when Lady Stacpoole is revealed to have undergone a transformation as complete as that of the building around her, well, let's just say that's one tour I would join in an instant, whatever Mr. Bennett's feelings toward the efficacy, or otherwise, of the preservation-minded National Trust. Two other shows also allow their leading ladies to shine. "Daddy Long Legs" is an extensively traveled musical that began in California in 2009 and has now sent its original cast across the pond for a limited run at London's newest playhouse, the St. James Theatre - a venue whose steep rake may perturb those suffering from vertigo. On the other hand, the sightlines are fantastic. That said, I can't imagine not responding to the unforced charm, and lilting soprano, of distaff player Megan McGinnis, here cast as the orphaned Jerusha Abbott, who strikes up a lengthy epistolary relationship with the spidery figure of the title. In actuality, "daddy long legs" is one Jervis Pendleton, an emotionally indrawn man of means who becomes both Jerusha's benefactor and the object of a none-too-healthy obsession on her part. I mean, doesn't this sprightly and attractive young woman have any friends? The "daddy" stuff is also pretty creepy, but we won't dwell on that. The musical two-hander poses no shortage of comparably niggling queries, which include doubts as to Jerusha's mental acumen confronted with a narrative requiring her to be oblivious to a reality that ends up staring her quite literally in the face. And the book writer John Caird's direction doesn't help, fudging what should be an eventually tremulous encounter between two people who have hitherto existed for one another only on the page.