SOURCE: “Faulty Families,” in Commonweal, December 1, 1989, pp. 671, 676.

In the following review, Weales discusses the problematic portrayal of the female protagonist in The Secret Rapture.

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...