[Plenty] is an ambitious effort to create a comprehensive X-ray of England's soul following World War II. Taking social fluoroscopes is an important, even crucial, dramatic function—it was Chekhov's motive in The Cherry Orchard, for example, and Shaw's in Heartbreak House—though such tasks have grown more difficult as the diagnostics have grown more complicated. I don't think Hare entirely accomplishes his intention, but I honor him for it, and pray it has a salutary influence on American playwrights, most of whom are still engaged in counting kitchen angels on the heads of domestic pins….

It is Hare's conviction that World War II represented England's last heroic moment (the play was written before the Falkland victory restored some of the country's lost pride), after which it experienced a series of demoralizing deceptions and compromises, tied to the loss of empire. Ironically, this was a time of relative affluence, an era of peace and plenty; it was also a period when the relationship between the individual and the family, between the individual and society, began to break down. Susan Traherne is not Everywoman, but her condition is representative of the entire English middle class in showing an intelligent, spirited, delicately poised human being pulverized by the failures of her time.

This demonstration, however, along with a somewhat shaky structure, exposes the most uncertain aspect of the play, for it assigns purely social causes to problems that may at least be partially existential. Hare doesn't provide enough information about Susan Traherne to define her conscious or unconscious motivations with an exactitude, but he intentionally idealizes her wartime experience, and even returns to it in a final flashback when she appears, young and innocent in a flower dress, to say: "We have grown up. We will improve our world." The postwar world, however, doesn't improve, and neither does Susan. (p. 24)

The climactic event in [the lives of Susan and her husband], and the greatest source of disillusion for their generation, is Suez, when Britain under Eden made a halfhearted final effort to preserve the Empire: "Nobody will say blunder, international farce," Susan stridently announces at a formal dinner, "Nobody will say death rattle of the ruling class." In the grip of mental illness, embittered, out of control, Susan enacts her "psychiatric cabaret," haunted by memories of wartime France, of the time when British soldiers last landed in a country where they were wanted.

It is the most resonant scene in the play, for it tells the tragic story of many wars after World War II—America's Vietnam, Israel's Lebanon, one suspects Soviet Russia's Afghanistan—wars that instead of uniting the people, divided them. It is an event that leads to the death of one of Hare's most interesting characters, Leonard Darwin, the ambassador who served as Brock's mentor, after Darwin has lost all belief in his calling as a result of the country's bad faith. But fiascos like Suez are not enough to explain Susan's addiction to drink and drugs, her suicide attempts, or her indifference about sleeping, as she says, with men that she knows. Nor does the plea of affluence, though it is one that Susan herself suggests: "Too much money, I think that's what went wrong. Corrupts the will to live." There is truth in the remark, but also the motive hunting of a free floating, perhaps motiveless, disenchantment, which, like Iago's evil, is responsible for extreme, inexplicable acts that defy explanation. In one scene (worthy of Strindberg), she decides to give away her house in Knightsbridge, strips it, throwing priceless antiques out of the window, and finally takes a shot at her infuriated husband after he threatens to have her committed.

Still, if Hare is not enough of a poet to penetrate Susan's despair, he is enough of a playwright to dramatize it; and he is a gifted artificer of blistering, lacerating dialogue. (pp. 24-5)

Plenty is compromised by incompleteness and structural asymmetry (I suspect the scenes in France originally sandwiched the play that is preferable to making the first one a flashback), but it is undeniably alive. For once, the problems come from being too close to the object, not from manipulating it by remote control. (p. 25)