Straight Line Crazy review – another flaming success from torchbearer David Hare
There was once a man who, in a fit of messianic fervour, imposed chaotic planning changes on one of the greatest cities on the planet. A few strides across the embankment from City Hall, the lair of Mayor Sadiq Khan (traffic strangler, cycle lane Putin, 20MPH-speed-bump Tsar and ULEZ dictator) is The Bridge Theatre, which – without any observable sense of irony – was staging Straight Line Crazy, by David Hare.
About a different megalomaniac, Robert Moses, the planner/dictator who, for thirty years, bestrode New York, almost destroying it in the process. Moses first came to my attention via Robert Caro’s fabulous 1974 book, The Power Broker, Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, frequently revised.
I’m sure Hare has also read Pierre Balez and Olivier Christin’s 1981 counterblast, Robert Moses, The Master Builder of New York City. The Balaz/Christin version is a 105-page French comic book, only latterly translated into English. Bizarre.
Until, that is, you recollect that Paris, City of Light, was reconstructed à la Moses by his French Doppelganger, Baron Haussmann, in the mid 19th century. “À la defense de planification”! “Planification” was actually a policy of the great de Gaulle in the 1960s.
Anyway, Hare knows a good spat when he sees one and Straight Line Crazy is compelling education, braced with snappy comedic dialogue. In the semi-round of the excellent Bridge Theatre, the playwright exploited all the dichotomies of the Moses character.
Unelected. The USA, for all its democracy, stretching down to city dog catchers, has a penchant for occasionally promoting unelected officials to positions of unassailable prominence, which a cunning apparatchik can then exploit.
Moses ruled the planning roost in New York from 1929 until 1960. First, as Secretary of State and then as Parks Commissioner from 1924 until 1960. He held various other appointments along the way in synch.
The cumulative impact allowed him to become a planning dictator, driving freeways through private land, razing districts for rehousing and eventually becoming a cropper when he tried to force a freeway through downtown Washington Square, effectively cutting it in twain.
While it was easy peasy to eject the working classes from their Bronx slums, when it came to the Washington Square woke, middle-class protectors, led by the redoubtable Jane Jacobs, he had met his match:
“If planning is good for human beings, it shouldn’t keep hurting them in the concrete, and helping them in the abstract.” Ouch!
Hare has assembled a terrific cast. Ralph Fiennes (Moses) and Helen Schlesinger (Jane Jacobs). Samuel Barnett (Ariel Porter) played the young man architect who served Moses through thick and thin before morphing into a wheelchair-bound, disillusioned critic and Siobhán Cullen (Finnuala Connel) who played Moses’ career-long PA who tolerated him across his idealistic/choleric spectrum.
And Danny Webb as Governor Al Smith, who was the booze addicted folksy, populist Governor of New York State from 1923 – 1928. Webb was a hoot, outwitted at every turn by Moses. He was an anti-prohibitionist “Wet”, eventually, after a failed tilt at the presidency, joining the corporation that built the Empire State Building.
Webb must be a shoo-in to play Bojo in Hare’s next venture, Birthday Cake Crazy, The Master Confabulator of Downing Street. David, when you get round to writing it, give Reaction a credit.
The play is in two acts, set primarily in Moses’ New York office. Act I finds Moses in messianic mood, determined to improve the lot of ordinary New Yorkers by opening up Long Island with freeways that will drive through the private residences of the privileged, such as Henry Vanderbilt, played by Guy Paul.
It all seems highly principled – let the people breathe – until Finnuala and Ariel twig that not people but the automobile will be king. Bridges on the parkways will not accommodate commercial vehicles, and their bridges are even set too low for buses. Still true today. No railroads were planned.
Act II moves on to the late Moses era, the forced migration of slum dwellers to “better” purpose-built apartments in the distant suburbs. It is a judgement on Moses that while his new builds are now mostly razed, the then turgid brownstones that remain are now prized property.
Hare’s ability to construct pin-sharp fast-moving dialogue which bowls the action along is second to none. The evening passes in a flash. Fiennes leaves the character of Moses unresolved, which is the whole point.
Every time I enter the Lincoln Center, Moses’ last hurrah midtown project, I wonder at his far-sightedness. Having seen Straight Line Crazy, I realise I should now also remember the community it displaced to allow me to enjoy my opera in its enthralling space.