Contrary to popular opinion, I can see nothing very mystifying about the construction of David Hare's new play A Map of the World …—except why he should have wanted to put it together that way in the first place. The principal action concerns emotional sparring and sexual rivalry going on in the margins of some U N conference on world poverty set in a plush Bombay hotel. The annexed material, as it were, is introduced smartly at the end of the first scene, by a quick dissolve … to a film studio where, a few years later, Hollywood-on-Thames is in the midst of travestying the novel one of the characters we have just met wrote about the whole business. From then on we go back and forth, but mostly back, with occasional interludes in the film-making present, until the last section …, when we settle to the present with a...