Despite the large claims David Hare's early plays made to be describing the state of England, there was always a danger that the general view, the overall verdict, would collapse into a purely local and personal reaction. This was particularly the case with Plenty, where what set out to be a chronicle of disappointment at the unfulfilled promise of Britain's post-war history came across more as a projection back onto it of disappointment at the unfulfilled promise of the 1960s. Hare is too good a writer and too accomplished a playwright not to have made Plenty a strong theatrical experience, but the underlying difficulty remained.

In his new play, A Map of the World, he has confronted this difficulty—the relationship between individual experience and general judgment—in the context not of England but of the world. The difficulty is not completely resolved—in part because other concerns...