David Denby

"I want to change everything, and I don't know how," says Susan Traherne, the spectacularly restless heroine of David Hare's celebrated play Plenty…. As a young woman, Susan (Meryl Streep) serves as a courier for the British secret service in occupied France. What happens to her there--the danger, the glamour, the hair-raising chance meetings--leaves her with an expansive and heroic vision of life's possibilities, a vision she cannot ever fulfill in England's gray postwar years. Horribly frustrated, she becomes a troublemaker, a madwoman, a bitch.

“Hare sets Plenty against the waning years of the Empire, a period in which, in his view, British power collapsed into an obsession with loyalty, propriety, and manners. But manners are precisely what Susan rages against as an offense against truth. Edgy and combative, she feels superior to most of the people she meets and works with; she makes scenes, falls apart, and becomes a misery both to herself and to the devoted man (Charles Dance) she marries, a career diplomat. Her only refuge is memory….

“What does Susan mean when she says that she wants to "change everything"? After the war, she never leaves her drawing room except to rampage through jobs for which she is patently unsuited. Her remark doesn't link up with anything specific that she does or even hopes for. Susan has a challenging temperament for a heroine--Hare has made her both courageous and dislikable, both noble and ineffective--but as John Simon pointed out when the play opened here, Susan doesn't make sense, she doesn't add up….”

“…. Hare… gives her no political interests or identity at all. Certainly there were more than a few people around after the war who would have been glad to tell her exactly "how" it was possible to "change everything," but none of ther even makes an appearance, and Susan herself does not become a Communist, a Socialist, a Laborite, a disarmament-leagur, an anti-vivisectionist, or even a Salvation Army major. And though some women might claim her as a victim of male supremacy, she doesn't become a feminist either. [Doesn't she have a bit of a "Nietzchean" morality, but with a group identity? I don’t think that’s exactly an oxymoron.] As far as we can make out, she is completely self-absorbed.”

“But let us take her as Hare presents her--as a young person who joined up purely for excitement. What might she have done with herself after the war? A woman with a habit of flamboyant self-expression, eager to set everyone straight; eloquent, melodramatic, bracing--such a woman might have become an actress. Or perhaps a teacher or writer. No? All right then! A heroine of private life, a heroine of selfishness (… for example, Gwendolyn Harleth in George Elliot's Daniel Deronda). But Susan… [left out]

“Susan rails against cant and evasion. She wants life to be large and vivid and as clear-cut as a slap across the face. With that much anger in her, what on earth is she doing workings as… [Denby runs through her jobs]…. Enough! It is not Susan but the playwright who has found the wrong jobs. His conception of the character is false….

[leaving out a lot on Susan's character--too tired]

“Meryl Streep brings her considerable gentleness to the role, so her outbreaks of temper are truly shocking, and she has one great scene--a dinner party during the Suez crisis, in which she is smashingly dressed in a black strapless gown and her neck looks snaky and powerful, darting this way and that as she rakes the guests and her husband with her scorn for Britain's declining power. She can make neurosis disturbingly sexual. In scene after scene, she achieves a beautifully sustained mood, but she doesn't show us how the moods are connected to one another. How could she? Susan has no core--she's an idea for a character, not a living woman, and the greatest actress in the world couldn't make sense of her.”

David Denby
New York, September 30, 1985
[Most characters aren't living people, Stanley Kauffmann's occasional remarks notwithstanding.]