SOURCE: “Changes,” in New Republic, May 28, 1990, pp. 24-5.

In the following review, Kauffmann argues that Hare's dramatic works have taken a change for the worse, especially as evident in Strapless.

David Hare is going to the bad, which in his case means going to the good. Until recently, most of the work of this English playwright and screenwriter has been sharp, mordant, quietly outraged, intent on dramatizing laconically the compromises and hypocrisies of our time. Such plays as Slag and Plenty and Licking Hitler and A Map of the World, whatever their flaws, held Hare’s world to a rigorous grilling. He often directed his plays, with an imaginative terseness that matched his writing, and he directed his screenplay Wetherby in masterly fashion, a film that showed how a group of people were harrowed variously by a suicide in their midst. Up to now Hare’s very name...