Her performance received good reviews with one critic praising her "extraordinary force, grace and passion".
Click here for a profile of Cate Blanchett.
The Australian actress has followed a host of screen stars onto the London stage, including her fellow countrywoman Nicole Kidman. Although Blanchett is more famous for her role as the young Queen Elizabeth in Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth, she is no stranger to the theatre - in her native Australia she is an experienced stage actress.
In Plenty Blanchett plays Susan Traherne, a former special agent in wartime France who becomes disillusioned in post-war Britain. Julian Wadham stars as her husband Raymond Brock and Burt Kwouk as a diplomat.
Glowing reviews
"Miss Blanchett hits exactly the right sound of despair, rhetoric and self-dramatisation. She is a marvel, and a revelation."
Daily Mail
"The evening will be remembered for Blanchett, who seizes the play by the scruff of the neck and often succedds in shaking it to life. Pencil thin and often wonderfully glamorous, she ranges from cool irony to raging fury, and in her rare moments of tenderness she seems to glow from within."
Daily Telegraph
"Svelte and assured, bitter and brassy, crazily aggressive and... oddly vulnerable; Blanchett gives us the lot."
The Times
But not all critics admired Blanchett's interpretation of the role. The Guardian calls her performance,"so frenziedly neurotic as almost to forfeit one's sympathy."
Plenty runs at the Albery Theatre until 10 July
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Cate Blanchett's rise to the throne
(27 Apr 99 | Entertainment)