Play: Plenty

Overview
David Hare’s Plenty, first staged in 1978, charts the corrosive gap between wartime idealism and peacetime compromise through the life of Susan Traherne, a former Special Operations Executive courier. Spanning from 1943 to the early 1960s and structured non-chronologically, the play uses Susan’s private unraveling to mirror Britain’s public drift from sacrifice and moral clarity to complacency, cynicism, and bureaucratic paralysis. Its ironic title evokes the postwar promise of material abundance that fails to supply meaning, integrity, or purpose.

Plot and Structure
The play opens during the Second World War in occupied France, where Susan, young and incandescent with purpose, completes a perilous mission and briefly connects with a French resistance operative. That charged night becomes the lodestar for her life: a moment of danger fused to authenticity, against which all later experience is measured and found wanting.

After the war, Susan returns to a Britain undergoing reconstruction and consumer expansion. She drifts through jobs and bohemian circles, restlessly searching for work or love that might equal her wartime intensity. She forms a lasting friendship with Alice, a sharp-tongued advertising professional, but finds the world of selling and surfaces intolerable. She marries Raymond Brock, a decent, pragmatic Foreign Office official whose career depends on discretion and diplomatic poise. Susan’s contempt for double-speak and moral trimming collides with Ray’s patient incrementalism, especially as Britain navigates humiliation abroad and conformity at home.

Hare presents their marriage through jump-cuts: a chilly embassy reception; a brittle dinner party where Susan detonates social niceties and scars Ray’s prospects; an intimate attempt to conceive that becomes a test of control, class, and despair; an embassy posting shadowed by the Suez fiasco, where national delusion and private compromise intertwine. Between these scenes, Susan oscillates between caustic wit and raw vulnerability, insisting that the country’s public lies are an assault on personal sanity. Her breakdowns are never merely medical; they are political indictments, enacted in kitchens and drawing rooms.

The final scene returns to wartime France, restoring the earlier vision of ardor and possibility. The retrospective glow is piercing rather than sentimental: the audience, having seen Susan’s future, recognizes the tragic charge of that remembered purity and the cost of living when such measureless hope cannot be reconciled with ordinary time.

Themes
Plenty interrogates the myth of national renewal, suggesting that postwar prosperity substitutes consumption for conviction. It explores the fate of those, like Susan, who experienced transcendent purpose and cannot recalibrate to the compromises of peace. The play traces the intertwined decay of public ethics and private stability, arguing that evasions in foreign policy, especially around Suez, seep into the fabric of intimate life. Gender is central: Susan’s refusal to be accommodating or strategically charming marks her, in a patriarchal professional culture, as mad or dangerous, while the institutions that gaslight her maintain their veneer of sanity.

Character Focus
Susan is neither martyr nor monster but a woman who insists that life should be equal to the extremity of her experience. Her cruelty springs from wounded idealism; her clarity, from having once risked everything for a cause. Ray offers an alternative ethic of duty and endurance, yet his compromises expose the moral cost of keeping the machinery running. Alice, worldly and ironic, embodies survival through adaptation, illuminating the price paid in self-editing and performance.

Style and Legacy
Hare’s episodic structure and razor dialogue produce a political drama that refuses pamphleteering, letting private mess stand in for public malaise. Premiered at the National Theatre and later adapted into a film, Plenty became a defining work of late-20th-century British theater, crystallizing the psychic aftermath of victory and Britain’s uneasy passage from empire to affluence. Its final image leaves not nostalgia but a challenge: whether plenty without purpose can ever suffice.