Straight Line Crazy

Bridge Theatre, London                                           Until June 18, 2hrs 30mins

Rating:

Ralph Fiennes was in the recent Beat The Devil, a monologue about David Hare’s Covid experience. Now Fiennes is back, in braces and baggy trousers, playing one of America’s worst megalomaniacs in Hare’s latest.

Robert Moses was a phenomenally driven, twisted genius who accrued huge civic power.

In the middle decades of the last century he virtually rebuilt New York, including all its major roads. Anything in his way was demolished. Moses was never elected to office, and yet a succession of mayors licked his toecaps.

The play presents him at the start of his career, in 1926, when he was a young idealist determined to let the working people of New York enjoy the beaches of Long Island by building vast highways in the teeth of opposition from the resident millionaire barons.

In the second half he becomes the Putin of city planning, devoted to demolishing huge swathes of the city for his road projects – famously the Cross Bronx Expressway, which caused appalling devastation (Boris Johnson’s hated HS2 rail line leaps to mind).

Fiennes, fists on hips, jaw jutting, has his lair in an office decked out (in Bob Crowley’s superb design) with maps, road plans and models.

When he tries to run a highway through Washington Square Park, he runs up against the sort of opponents he knew little about… women.

Hare includes real-life activists Jane Jacobs (Helen Schlesinger) and Shirley Hayes (Alana Maria), who campaigned against him along with the (sadly unseen) Eleanor Roosevelt.

‘I never meet that woman without wanting to punch her stupid liberal face,’ says Moses of the president’s wife.

Instead of seeing more of these feisty women we are over-acquainted with Moses’s loyal dogsbody in a wheelchair (Samuel Barnett) and his long-suffering assistant (Siobhán Cullen), who dares to point out that his vision of a brave new world doesn’t include the city’s minorities.

Fiennes gives top value in his big, messianic speeches, or when bantering with the cussing, pinstriped Irish governor, Al Smith (Danny Webb is terrific), the only guy Moses ever loved.

But in the end, Moses was utterly corrupted by power. I came out wanting a stronger whiff of evil.