Plenty by David Hare

First published: 1978

First produced: 1978, at the Lyttleton Theatre, London

Type of plot: Social realism; allegory

Time of work: 1944-1962

Locale: St. Benoit, France; London and Blackpool, England; and Brussels, Belgium

Principal Characters:

• Raymond Brock, a British diplomat
• Susan Traherne, his wife, a British intelligence courier in France
• Alice Park, Susan’s friend, a radical feminist
• Lazar, a British intelligence agent and Susan’s lover during World War II
• Sir Leonard Darwin, Raymond’s superior in the Foreign Service
• Mick, a lower-class hustler
• Sir Andrew Charleson, the personnel chief of the British Foreign Service

The Play

Plenty begins in a room that has been stripped bare, like the prostrate, bloody, naked man who lies sleeping on a mattress. Susan sits smoking on a packing case as Alice enters and discusses the cold climate, which she relates to the “loveless English,” thereby callously acknowledging the existence of Raymond. From their conversation the audience learns that there has been a fight between Susan and her husband Raymond and that Susan is leaving him and giving their house to Alice, who will use it as a home for unwed mothers.

The second scene shifts abruptly from 1962 London to 1943 France, where Susan and Lazar, two British undercover agents, have met at night in a field—Lazar has just parachuted into France and awaits a “drop” from an airplane. Despite the interference of the well-intentioned French Underground, the two secure the package. The distraught Susan loses her composure, declares that she does not want to die, like Tony, at Buchenwald, and embraces Lazar. Lazar asks her the French term for “mackerel sky,” un ciel pommele (the phrase is repeated during their abortive reunion in scene 11); and while nothing romantic happens onstage, the excitement and vitality of this scene suggests the offstage sexual relationship that sustains Susan in the postwar years of torpor and mediocrity.

The following lengthy scene, which occurs in 1947 Brussels, introduces Sir Leonard Darwin, Raymond’s superior in the British Foreign Service. Tony, with whom Susan has been touring Europe, has died abruptly, and it is Raymond’s task to make the necessary arrangements. Since Tony has a wife back in England, Raymond’s job is a bit complicated, and he has to make a conscious decision to lie. (Raymond’s initial assistance leads to further concessions and the eventual ruination of his diplomatic career.) This scene also establishes Susan’s distinction between “them,” the “fools . . . who stayed behind,” and “us,” “those of us who went through this kind of war” in France. Susan’s impatience and intolerance is at odds with Darwin’s naïve, evolutionary optimism about European reconstruction: “Ideals. Marvellous. Marvellous time to be alive in Europe.”

Scene 4 begins with a radio announcer’s apt comments about a “reconstructed” musical selection and then dramatizes the extent to which Susan’s obsession with the past dominates her life. As Raymond sleeps, a visual reminder of Scene 1, Susan and Alice, an aspiring writer, discuss Susan’s problems with her amorous boss and the status of her affair with Raymond, who has been commuting from Brussels on weekends. Raymond wakes; as he speaks of “acclimatizing” and becoming rich, Susan cleans her gun (Alice says that she is “fondling” it), suggesting that she, like Darwin, “has slight problems of adjustment to the modern age.” Susan’s testiness and Raymond’s resentment at her obscene criticisms of the Foreign Service result in a battle between people from different worlds. He asks, “But what other world do I have?” After a pause, Susan states, “I think of France more than I tell you.” Even at this early stage of their relationship Raymond has learned that “when you [Susan] talk longingly about the war . . . some deception usually follows.” Alice concludes the scene with a reference to “peace and plenty.”

In scenes 5 and 6 Susan, having decided to have a child, secures the services of Mick, a hustling East Ender who cannot deal with being sexually used by a woman, particularly since his failure reflects on his manhood. Time again becomes the focus as Mick, the jazz “revivalist,” declares that for him “it all stops in 1919,” and Susan states, “England can’t be like this forever.” Scene 5 ends, fittingly, with Susan, who is about to start her affair with Mick, referring to the mackerel sky associated with Lazar. Susan’s past also affects the end of scene 7, when, confronted by an angry Mick, she fires her revolver over his head.

The Suez Canal debacle is the focus of scene 7, which takes place in the Knightsbridge home featured in the first scene. At a dinner party the Brocks stage for Burmese guests and Darwin, Susan suffers another breakdown. She apparently cannot refrain from mentioning the Suez Canal “blunder or folly or fiasco,” which she sees as the “death-rattle of the ruling class.” Susan’s disillusionment is shared, though not so hysterically, by Darwin, who resents being lied to by the government and declares that “when the English are the cowboys, then in truth I fear for the future of the globe.” To change the subject, a guest is encouraged to describe Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1967), which unfortunately features a woman “who despises her husband.” The parallel prompts Susan’s memories of “poor parachutists” and women who spent a single night with English resistance fighters. At the end of the scene Susan declares, “There is plenty.”

After the interval, Raymond and Susan have returned from Iran for Darwin’s funeral, five years later. While the intervening years have been relatively calm for the Brocks, Susan’s inner peace has been achieved with pills. She will not return to Iran; the consequences of her decision are apparent in the following scene, in which she is interviewed on the BBC and then visits Sir Andrew Charleson at the Foreign Office. Sir Andrew and Susan discuss Raymond’s career, which is proceeding at a “slowish” pace, in part because of his unwillingness to return to his post in Iran. When she realizes that Raymond has no future, she threatens to shoot herself and attempts to shift the blame for Raymond’s fate to Sir Andrew.

The following scene, which occurs a year later at the Knightsbridge house, explains what led to the scene at the start of the play. As Susan begins to empty the house, Raymond asks, “Which is the braver? To live as I do? Or never, ever to face life like you?” When he threatens to have her committed, Susan sends Alice away and confronts Raymond. A month later, Susan and Lazar, who has heard the BBC interview and found her, are at Blackpool in a dingy hotel room, where both attempt to recapture what they had in France. To Susan’s dismay, Lazar reveals that he “gave in. Always. All along the line,” though he had hoped to regain the “edge” he had in France. The loveless encounter ends when Lazar leaves, opening the door.

The open door discloses “a French hillside in high summer” in 1944, after the armistice. The young Susan addresses a French farmer, who grumbles about his situation. Susan, however, has a different perspective: “We will improve our world.” As she and her farmer friend walk down the hill, she affirms, “There will be days and days and days like this.”

Dramatic Devices

Although much of Plenty is staged realistically, the sets not only serve as backdrops for action but also express the state of the English nation. For example, the Knightsbridge home of the Brocks, which is “decorated with heavy velvet curtains, china objects and soft furniture” in scene 7, the occasion when the British seized the Suez Canal, is in scene 1 “stripped bare,” much like Raymond and England. Similarly, the dark, “sparsely furnished and decaying room” where Lazar and Susan attempt to recapture their past is at once, because of its darkness, reminiscent of the dark, exciting night when they met in the second scene and indicative of the decay in their own lives. When Susan states, “I’ve stripped away everything,” she means that she has discarded all trivial irrelevancies, but she also is “exposed,” like Brock, and there is little left, except obsessive memories destroyed by reality. In fact, as Bert Cardullo has pointed out, in Plenty David Hare reverses the usual consolations of darkness and light. Susan’s most exhilarating experience occurs in darkness, which makes her failure in the dark Blackpool hotel room even more ironic. Sunlight only reveals reality and her growing disillusionment and despair.

Similarly, Hare uses what Cardullo terms anticipatory darkness and sound to introduce all but two of the scenes; the darkness and sound become the promise that is destroyed when the house lights go up. While the sounds function to set the mood of a scene, they also serve occasionally as ironic commentary on what is to follow. In scene 7, for example, the music “from the dark” is “emphatic, triumphant,” before the lights reveal that British victory has been achieved through diplomatic lies and “cowboy” behavior, actions that are hardly compatible with Aung’s opening statement that “the English are the Greeks—ideas, civilization, intellect.” The triumphant music sounds the “death-rattle of the ruling class.”

The play does not begin in sound and darkness, because Hare wants the audience to see only the result of Susan’s disillusionment: There is no promise at this point in her life. When the scene shifts from Blackpool to St. Benoit, there is again no sound; in scene 12 the “darkened areas of the room” of scene 11 disappear and are replaced by a French hillside in summer. Thus, the scenes are not divided but merged, suggesting that the failure of scene 11 is directly attributable to the naïve optimism of scene 12. Hare’s stage directions are a bit ambiguous: There is a “fierce” green square. Despite the brilliant colors, ordinarily associated with life, the Frenchman in the scene has “an unnaturally gloomy air” as he comments on the status of the French (“the lowest of the low”) and complains that “the harvest is not good again this year.” Susan, however, ignores what the sunlight exposes—that there will not be “plenty”—and prefers to think that “we will improve our world.”

Critical Context

Plenty is the logical succession to David Hare’s earlier plays, which also chronicle the decline of English society. Slag (pr. 1970, pb. 1971), his first full-length play, was considered sexist by some critics; yet the play is as much about the boarding school as about the three women contending for power. Thus Slag is primarily critical of institutions. Brassneck (pr. 1973, pb. 1974), written with Howard Brenton, details the three-generation decline of a Midlands family. In the teleplay Licking Hitler (1978), the companion play to Plenty, Hare also examines a broad historical and geographical context and traces the British decline to the post-World War II years. In his later work for television and film, particularly in Wetherby (1985), a film he wrote and directed, Hare has used unusual protagonists, like Susan, who challenge audience empathy because they do not acclimate themselves to a society inimical to their values and beliefs. Hare’s male characters either adapt and lose their integrity or resist and are crushed by the system. Plenty has won for Hare an international reputation, primarily because the film version, which Hare also wrote, was a success. Meryl Streep, who played Susan, enhanced Susan’s complexity because her star appeal worked against the selfishness of Susan’s stage character.

Susan can be seen as a descendant of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, a railing misfit from the 1960’s, when “angry young men” dominated the English stage. Hare can himself be linked with Terence Rattigan and Osborne, who also have used ideological conflict in their plays. Hare’s anger, however, has lasted into the 1970’s and 1980’s, and his attention has remained focused on left-wing politics. Though he is a decidedly English writer, his later work has been more international in scope and has been favorably compared to Bertolt Brecht’s in political stance and dramatic technique. He is, with Tom Stoppard, the most accomplished of contemporary English dramatists and certainly, because of his work in television and film, one of the most versatile.

Sources for Further Study

Brustein, Robert. “Theatre: Plenty.” The New Republic, November 29, 1982, 24.

Bull, John. New British Political Dramatists. London: Macmillan, 1983.

Cardullo, Bert. “Hare’s Plenty.” Explicator 93, no. 2 (1985): 62-63.

Donesky, Finlay. David Hare: Moral and Historical Perspectives. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Gale, Steven H. “David Hare’s Plenty.” In Drama, Sex and Politics, edited by James Redmond. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Homden, Carol. The Plays of David Hare. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Olivia, Judy Lee. “David Hare.” In British Playwrights, 1956-1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.