David Hare once observed that his plays were intended as puzzles for the audience to solve…. But Plenty … though far more disciplined than his previous offerings, is not a conundrum, merely a jigsaw puzzle with the pieces all too knowingly scrambled. In the end, after milking this purposive disarray for its maximum ironic value, Hare himself unriddles everything for us. We are left as spectators of not so much a play as a display: impressed, sometimes entertained, often dazzled. But quite unmoved. (p. 82)

[The point of Plenty] is not so much the story as the cunning way in which it is fragmented and skips back and forth in time. Some of this is to keep us guessing, surprised, and a bit bewildered; some of it is to underscore, often heavily, certain ironies about Britain's history, betrayed aspirations, and decline. As in all his plays, Hare keeps, directly or...