Straight Line Crazy

This marks a return to form for David Hare, a big meaty play where he throws his audience a thorny subject – what is a city and who is it for? – and in an impeccably researched play of ideas he gives us a star actor as the charismatic central protagonist. Hare still retains a soft spot for a theatrical flourish and while his plays are unashamedly didactic (in a style is currently out of fashion) this approach does leaven the proceedings.

The splash here is delivered by Ralph Fiennes who gives a proper barnstorming performance as Robert Moses. An unlikely hero, Moses (1888-1981) was essentially an urban planner. He famously cleared slums but favored the car over public transportation and his programs and designs influenced a whole generation of engineers, architects, and city developers, not always for the best.

Ralph Fiennes (Robert Moses), Alisha Bailey (Mariah Heller) and Siobhán Cullen (Finnuala Connell) PHOTO: MANUEL HARLAN

Fiennes brilliantly captures the haughty, patrician air of this Rhodes Scholar, who had no interest in engaging with the public about what was good for them, because he just knew. Hare has based the play on Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize winning biography, a 1200-page opus that, one suspects, is probably more purchased than read.

Moses was never elected to office but for 40 years (1920s to '60s) he used his guile and charm to manipulate various New York State governors to let him literally reshape the state. His greatest champion was Governor Al Smith in the Twenties, who is given a wonderfully rascally incarnation here by Danny Webb. The men were complete polar opposites, but their complementary natures worked to their mutual benefit.

A relatively unfashionable character for today's standards, Moses did start out as a radical (albeit a supremely elitist one) but ended up a curdled reactionary. You can see how this trajectory would have intrigued Hare, and Fiennes' performance brilliantly calibrates this journey.

In the 1920s Moses battled the intransigence of the grand families who wanted to keep Long Island unspoiled and for themselves, by going full steam ahead, creating new parks, new bridges and 627 miles of expressway as part of his mission to connect the people to the great outdoors. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.

By the 1950s, however, grassroots citizens groups – i.e. middle classes – began to organize against his schemes, such as destroying Washington Square Park as part of a crazy bigger plan to cut a whole series of expressways through and across Manhattan. The world had changed, and this new generation were anti-car and had different conceptions of city living. Crucially, they secured powerful allies such as Eleanor Roosevelt, which meant they prevailed.

The play is bursting with ideas and some choice one-liners and director Nicholas Hytner expertly animates what could have been just dry debates, but it still lacks dramatic momentum. Hare uses two supporting characters to embody the counterarguments. Samuel Barnett is the long-suffering deputy, Ariel, and Siobhán Cullen his devoted assistant, Finnuala. Both struggle to make their characters more than just ciphers. Finnuala ends up siding with the Washington Square protestors and in a 'Road to Damascus' moment, resigns. Having devoted her whole life to this man and defined herself around him, it is scarcely credible that she would have jumped ship at this stage.

There's also a rather clumsy framing device of using the architectural critic Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger), who became Moses' arch nemesis, to challenge the ideas. We expect to see her fleshed out more in the second act only to be disappointed. It's as if a whole section were cut.

Hare falls into the trap of romanticizing the 'Great Man' who gets things done and we forget that his idealism was undercut by much skulduggery, albeit that's the bread and butter of politics. Act 2 diverts us briefly into his personal life but doesn't illuminate. We learn, unsurprisingly, that he neglected all around him.

In the end the span of this man's life probably requires a miniseries more than a play.

>> MORE NEWS & FEATURES