Plenty is a play by David Hare about British post-war disillusion. Susan Traherne, a former secret agent, is a woman conflicted by the contrast between her past, exciting triumphs — she had worked behind enemy lines as a Special Operations Executive courier in Nazi-occupied France during World War II — and the mundane nature of her present life, as the increasingly depressed wife of a diplomat whose career she has destroyed. Viewing society as mo...
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Plenty is a play by David Hare about British post-war disillusion. Susan Traherne, a former secret agent, is a woman conflicted by the contrast between her past, exciting triumphs — she had worked behind enemy lines as a Special Operations Executive courier in Nazi-occupied France during World War II — and the mundane nature of her present life, as the increasingly depressed wife of a diplomat whose career she has destroyed. Viewing society as morally bankrupt, Susan has become self-absorbed, bored, and destructive — the slow deterioration in her mental health mirrors the crises in the ruling class of post-war Britain.
Susan Traherne's story is told in a non-linear chronology, alternating between her wartime and post-wartime lives, illustrating how youthful dreams rarely are realised and how a person's personal life can affect the outside world.
Hare's inspiration for Plenty came from the fact that 75 per cent of the women engaged in wartime SOE operations divorced in the immediate...
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