SOURCE: “England Has No Feelings, Yes?,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 7, 1999, p. 21.

In the following review, Duguid offers an unsatisfactory appraisal of Plenty.

David Hare was born in 1947, and grew up with films and comics about the Second World War. In 1978, when he came to write Plenty, he could put an up-to-date gloss on their tales of adventure and honour by adding elements from the recently published history of the SOE in France and the revelations of Anthony Blunt’s treachery. As in his television film Licking Hitler (1977), there is a female central character: Susan Traherne, a courier in France who, accustomed to war, cracks up under the pressures of peace and prosperity (a theme which has echoes of Rose Macaulay and of The Constant Nymph). Her story runs alongside a brief history of British post-war decline, as seen from the late 1970s: sexual decadence, Suez, the advertising...