The sound of shotguns can be heard offstage during the final scene of the first act of David Hare’s The Secret Rapture playing at the Barrymore Theatre in New York. When one of the characters grumbles that he had forgotten that country-house England spent its weekends slaughtering innocent animals, his remarks are more than an explanation of the sounds for the audience. The grumbler is a young artist who has just helped sacrifice his company and his boss—Isobel, the woman he loves—to money interests who will destroy the integrity of their design firm by smothering it in the platitudes of financial growth. He may not like to think so, but he has thus allied himself with the weekend hunters, as Isobel, the play’s protagonist, makes clear with the first-act curtain line. “The guns are getting nearer.” Add that the engulfing interests are represented by Isobel’s sister and her brother-in-law, and it becomes clear that The Secret Rapture is another mixture of the psychological and the political, recalling earlier Hare plays like Knuckle (1974), Plenty (1978), and A Map of the World (1983).

There is often a difficulty with Hare heroines. For example, is the protagonist of Plenty an idealist wrecked by society or simply a very destructive woman? In Rapture Hare wants to avoid that kind of ambiguity—as Benedict Nightingale indicates in an interview piece with the playwright (New York Times, October 22)—by insisting on Isobel’s goodness and concentrating on the way it is received. “I’ve noticed that goodness tends to make people shifty, and makes those with bad consciences feel judged even when they’re not being judged at all,” says Hare, who makes that point in Rapture—perhaps more often than necessary—by having the brittle sister, the alcoholic mother-in-law, and the rejected lover react to unvoiced criticism.

However tantalizing as a character, Isobel never achieves the force, the presence of those who surround her. Her desire to withdraw, to find a quiet place (the play begins with her sitting alone in her dead father’s bedroom), and the restraint which she brings to even her most assertive gestures make her a character for whom action is reaction. For this reason, a distance remains between Isobel and her family, her lover and, unfortunately, the audience. Not even Blair Brown’s attractive performance can quite bridge the empathetic divide.

We are to assume that Isobel, who seems a simple character, is in fact a complex one, one who recognizes that the connections among human beings are never easy to define. Her sister Marion has been confused and hurt by a world that she cannot understand—as she says late in the play—and she has chosen to reduce the intricacies of life to encompassing formulas. She has used anger and aggression to impose a bogus rationality on the irrationalities of life. Her choice is a political one. She is an official in the Conservative government and, as Frances Conroy wonderfully plays her, she dresses, speaks, and moves like Margaret Thatcher at her iciest. She is not a parody, but an evocation of the prime minister which gives a clear indication of Marion’s pretend sense of her self and what unquestioning assurance means to contemporary England. Her husband is a born-again Christian who talks of the comfort of Jesus, but whose Christian Industries embraces and then abandons Isobel and her company.

Nightingale says that Hare wants to “draw attention to the unpretentious private good which, he feels, has somehow managed to endure in an increasingly tough, predatory Britain.” Yet, does it endure? The character certainly does not, since Isobel is killed by her lover. At the end of the play, Marion has put aside her Thatcher suit for a gentler black dress of mourning and has restored her father’s living room as it was when he died. Perhaps Isobel’s goodness has broken through Marion’s shell. An invigorating martyrdom? The title describes the ecstasy of that moment when a nun is united with Christ; yet Hare tells Nightingale that he chose it “because it’s about death.” A religious element would be a surprise in Hare’s work unless it were metaphorical, a psychological or political discovery by Marion. Death? Or a living room? The brother-in-law, who says he has been out of touch with Jesus recently, describes the room as a copy of what it was, an uninspirited restoration. At the end, Marion cries out for her sister to come home, but the audience never knows whether or in what form there is an answer.