From: Celebration: 25 Years of British Theatre by C.Wintor, S.Edwards, M.Billington, M.Owen, M.Coveney, M.Shulman, M.Clarke, and C.Crisp

… And so to 1978 and the Canadian-born Kate Nelligan's Award for her performance in David Hare's Plenty. She was, of course, lucky in one sense: she had one of the best parts written for a woman by a post-war English dramatist. But there was more to it than that. As her heroine who had a good war but then found herself drifting, insecure and helpless in peace, she conveyed the self-dislike that is the product of wasted intelligence. Miss Nelligan is not a bubbling, overflowing actress. She is more like a Knightsbridge Garbo: a cool, intelligent performer who suggests emotional reserves on which any trespasser will be prosecuted and who has a quality of containment that makes you watch her all the time. She failed as Shakespeare's Rosalind for the RSC because her joy seemed anything but unconfined; she succeeded in Plenty because she conveyed the impression of an ironic intelligence with no proper outlet.

Photograph by Bert Stern

From Vanity Fair March, 1983

Frank Rich, theatre critic for the New York Times, wrote the following pre-Broadway review on October 22, 1982 while Plenty was playing at the Public Theater….

It's not until late in Act 2 that the audience hears the noise of breaking glass in David Hare's Plenty, but long before then, we've become terribly familiar with the harrowing sound of things going smash. A partial list of the evening's casualties would include at least three lives, one empire (the British), the egalitarian ideals of a generation, and many of the conventions of the traditional narrative play.

But if this sounds reckless, Mr. Hare is no indiscriminate vandal. Out of the bloody shards of the ruins, this young British playwright has meticulously erected an explosive theatrical vision of a world that was won and lost during and after World War II

Plenty, which was first produced by England's National Theatre in 1978, received its New York premiere last night at the Public's Newman Theater, where it brings this stillborn theatrical autumn to stunning life. Like the original production, the current one has been directed by the author and stars Kate Nelligan. It couldn't be any other way. Working with a largely American cast, Mr. Hare has staged his work with a precise and chilling lyricism that perfectly complements his disquieting writing. As for Ms. Nelligan, the Canadian-born actress known for her screen role in The Eye of the Needle, mere adjectives are beside the point. Only a fool would hold his breath waiting to see a better performance this season.

The star, who is onstage throughout, plays Susan Traherne, an Englishwoman who, at seventeen, served as a courier for the French Resistance behind German lines. Plenty is about what happens to Susan during the war and in the two disillusioning decades to come. Convinced that the heroic values of the Resistance would carry over to the "New Europe" of peacetime, Susan soon finds herself traipsing through mindless jobs and destructive relationships in a declining England that is choking on "plenty" but has lost its moral rudder. Intolerant of both her society and intimates, she drifts into madness and takes her innocent, loving husband, a Foreign Service officer played by Edward Herrmann, down with her.

Mr. Hare tells Susan's tale in a dozen scenes that are ripped out of chronological order. His play's structure, which can be slightly confusing, employs flashback, flashforward, and in medias res. While it's a jigsaw puzzle that only comes together at the end, it's no gimmick: Mr. Hare has found a visceral theatrical embodiment for the central tension in his heroine's soul. The France of the 1940s is always as much in focus as the modern England of Suez and rampant commercialization; we constantly see each setting refracted through the other.

The liberated chronology also allows the author to crystallize his highly selective story and character details; he strips away psychological, plot, and ideological exposition to achieve a concentrated naturalism. Susan, like the Hedda Gabler she sometimes resembles (gun included), is an incandescent, troubling force who doesn't have to be explained away: We see her in context and she just is. As Ms. Nelligan says to Mr. Herrmann in their first meeting, "I tell you nothing-I just say look at me and make a judgment." That complicated judgment, which is ultimately asked from all of us, is the incendiary crux of the play.

The writing's jagged fractionalization further gives Plenty a hallucinatory, nightmarish quality that makes it feel more like a disorienting Nicolas Roeg film than John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. The mood of mystery is heightened by Nick Bicat's subtly ominous music and the superb physical production.

John Gunter's sets float like haunted Magritte rooms within the stage's walls, which are papered with a ghostly black-and-gray mural of a bygone romantic England. Jane Greenwood's costumes, meanwhile, anchor the characters in vivid social reality. The lighting designer, Arden Fingerhut, gives the gloom of contemporary London a remarkable variety of dreamlike textures even as she creates the dangerous, pulse-quickening glow of a nocturnal war-torn France where parachutes plummet from the stars.

The dialogue within each scene is often a tour de force interweaving subliminal rage, ellipses, and caustic wit. Mr. Hare doesn't waste words, and the ones he uses are crackling, whether they deal with the dreary English climate (even "passion comes down at you through a blocked nose") or the internecine politics of a Foreign Service that requires six thousand officers to dismantle an empire that once only took six hundred men to run. In the play's most remarkable scene-a diplomatic party in the midst of the Suez debacle-a grueling marital fight is blended in with an anguished political debate, comical small talk about an Ingmar Bergman film, and the hilarious malapropisms of a sycophantic Burmese ambassador (Conrad Yama).

The mostly exemplary supporting cast begins with Mr. Herrmann, who may be giving the performance of his career as Susan's husband, a moneyed, generous, self-reproachful man who sadly pursues his diplomatic calling because, as he plaintively asks, "What other world do I have?" His sputtering collapse is preceded by one brave and rending effort to break through his cheery reserve and jolt Susan back into reality.

No less brilliant is George Martin, who provides a tragic yet funny, Graham Greene-esque version of the farcical, fussbudget British bureaucrat he performed in Harold Pinter's The Hothouse last season. There is also flawless work from Ellen Parker as Susan's best friend, a bohemian who survives her alienation as the heroine does not, and from Daniel Gerroll, as an amiable working-class fellow who is pitifully gored by Susan's sexual manipulations.

Ms. Nelligan's performance can be admired in a multitude of ways: for its unflagging intensity, for its lack of mannerisms in delineating a neurotic character, for the seamlessness with which it blends the clear-eyed, rosy-cheeked Susan of seventeen with the feverish, slow-burning firecracker of a woman who follows. In the play's middle stretches-when she's tossing out sardonic wisecracks about her advertising copywriter's job or calmly plotting to have a child by a man she "barely knows"- the actress manages to show us how a deeply disturbed woman could appear completely lucid, even dazzlingly self-possessed.

Later on Ms. Nelligan provides "a psychiatric cabaret"- first when she lashes out with unprovoked obscenities at Mr. Herrmann in public circumstances, then when she levitates into drugged hysteria while meeting a revered but now pathetic old Resistance comrade (Kelsey Grammer) for a nostalgic assignation in a seedy Blackpool hotel room. Yet, as magnetic and moving as Ms. Nelligan is, she never neglects the selfishness and cruelty of a woman who makes the wrong people pay for the failings of a civilization.

That's important, because, in Mr. Hare's view, Susan is perhaps more responsible for those failings than anyone around her. If the author believes that idealists have a right to "a kind of impatience" with a world that betrays their noble, hard-won victories, he also seems to feel that Susan should have struggled anew for those ideals rather than "lose control" by giving in to bitterness and cynicism. And, of course, his perspective applies not only to World War II Resistance fighters, but also to the endless waves of defeated idealists who came before and after.

That's why the sharp edges of this relentlessly gripping play reach beyond its specific milieu to puncture our conscience. It's also why Plenty pointedly ends not with its heroine's defeat, but with a blazing tableau in which the young, innocent Susan of 1944 climbs a bucolic hill to "get a better view" of the newly liberated France that once promised her a utopian future. In Plenty, Mr. Hare asks that we, too, climb up to reclaim a "better view"- but not before he has shaken us violently at the bottom of that hill, not before he's forced us to examine just how we choose to live in our own world of plenty right now.

Though I would later get in a public brawl with David Hare-as recounted in "Exit the Critic "- I was one of his most fervent cheerleaders among New York drama critics. Plenty had a mixed reception and only a modest run when it transferred to Broadway.

From Frank Rich's "Critic's Notebook. The New York Times January 13, 1983

DAVID HARE'S "Plenty" is an anomaly, all right. It s not only the one piece of brilliant theater to arrive on Broadway this season, but it's also that rare English play to receive a stronger critical and popular response on this side of the Atlantic than at home.

According to Mr. Hare in a recent interview, this phenomenon may have to do with American theatergoers' distance from the post-World War II English history that his play describes. While the audiences who saw "Plenty" at London's National Theater in 1978 were antagonized by the scabrous references to the Suez debacle and other benchmarks of the Empire's postwar decline, Americans have no pride invested in such matters and aren’t affronted by their presentation on stage.

But this alone doesn't explain the play's appeal here. If we are not offended by Mr. Hare's lacerating view of English history, neither are we overly stimulated by it. We've long ago assimilated John Osborne's dissections of the same period and, besides, we have more pressing matters of our own to worry about than England's misfortunes. It's in a more indirect way that our distance from the social background of "Plenty" changes our perspective on the work. Because we don't focus on that background, we are liberated. as English audiences apparently were not, to study the play's foreground and see clearly what "Plenty" is really about. And what we find is that "Plenty" isn't parochially about England - it's about "plenty" and the people who squander it. Surely it's not happenstance that Mr. Hare makes more reference to food and gluttony than to Anthony Eden.

Susan Traherne, the heroine-portrayed so extraordinarily by Kate Nelligan, has plenty of everything - of intelligence, of sex appeal. of money, of people who love her. She also has many high ideals, which were forged when she served as a teen-age courier for the French Resistance during the war. But when her postwar society fails to live up to her utopian dreams, she doesn't honorably keep up the fight for a better world. Instead, she moves into the materialistic mainstream - even as she hypocritically attacks others for doing the same and becomes a selfish, lying and destructive malcontent. Susan would rather inflict infinite pain on everyone around her than face up to her own failure to live up to her high principles. She could be any idealist anywhere who sells out for the insidious blandishments of "plenty."

Seeing the play again on Broadway - where it is no less stunning than it was at the Public - I was also struck by the author's seemingly irrelevant digression about F. Scott Fitzgerald. But perhaps Susan also has something of Daisy Buchanan about her: They are both magnetic, spoiled, privileged women who, as "The Great Gatsby" has it, "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness" "and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Indeed, that Fitzgerald passage is paraphrased in "Plenty" by Susan's discarded working-class lover, who explodes at the "cool and dangerous" heroine for idly wrecking other people's lives.

Susan's white-flamed neuroticism also recalls Hedda Gabler (gun included), as well as one of the most memorable movie heroines of the 196o's - the title character played by Julie Christie in Richard Lester’s "Petulia." Like Susan, the equally breakdown-prone Petulia blames everyone except herself for the way her world - the hip, moneyed San Francisco of the Vietnam era - has gone wrong.

Actually, "Petulia" and "Plenty" have a lot in common. Both works use a fractionalized time scheme that esthetically suggests the social and psychological collapse that befell the United States and England at home as they carried out unpopular, calamitous military adventures in the East. Is Mr. Hare, who came of age in the 196O's, thinking as much of Vietnam America as Suez England? Maybe not. But I do feet that our strong response to "Plenty" has little to do with our distance from England. It is our close proximity to our own divided home front of "plenty" that sucks us into Mr. Hare's apocalyptic landscape.