Pauline Kael

“Plenty, David Hare's sick-soul-of-England play… features an all-inclusive malaise: hypocrisy, purposelessness, emotional atrophy. Meryl Streep's Susan Traherne lives as aimless an existence as Jeanne Moreau did back in Antonioni's La Notte, but she's a whole lot more vocal about it…. David Hare had a bright (sneaky) idea when he wrote this play: he uses Susan Traherne to voice his own judgments of what has gone rancid in England since the war. That is, he has turned his own preachiness into the courage and intellectual clarity of an abrasive woman. Disillusioned with England's materialist values, Susan Traherne doesn't lie to herself, and she can't keep what she thinks to herself, either. She's always telling people off, and her outspokenness turns her into a scourge, and eventually into a basket case…. We're given to understand that there's no place in the society for her ruthless, embittered honesty; her mind will have to be dulled, she will have to be treated as an invalid or, worse, a lunatic….

[Kael compares and contrasts Susan with Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger]….

“The role of the martyred independent-minded woman is bound to magnetize actresses, but Hare's putting his denunciation of the stultifying affluent society into Susan's mouth and having her go over the edge from the strain of carrying around so much truth is a bad bright idea. The center of the material is nothing but showoffy verbiage--Susan Traherne is a walking harangue. An actress with a vivid presence might give the role something of her own substance--as Vanessa Redgrave does in Hare's Wetherby…--but Meryl Streep isn't that kind of actress. She's strictly an interpreter, and her interpretive skills don't help her here. I can't point to any scenes where she falters, except in the opening and closing moments, in which she's the teen-age Susan. In the first, she seems coated with makeup, as if youth were a matter of a perfect wax job, and she overdoes her openmouthed fear; she's brittle and eccentric. In the last (a flashback), she's fake naïve, and the material defeats her: it reëmphasizes the irony of Susan's blasted hopes which we've already gnawed on for two hours. For the rest, she's proficient, yet vocally bland and totally lacking in the neurotic strength that might lend the role a semblance of believability. As she plays the part, there's no imploded energy in Susan's rudeness and no force in the film. She just isn't there….

“According to Hare, Plenty is "a film about the cost of spending your whole life in dissent…. Susan is prepared to pay that high price." But that's not what the film is about. Susan isn't prepared to pay anything; she doesn't make choices--she's driven. And she isn't a dissenter in any recognizable sense. She's the mouthpiece of an upper-crust leftist playwright expressing his contempt for his class as if that were a revolutionary act….

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, October 7, 1985
Hooked, pp 41-45