Straight Line Crazy
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
At the Bridge Theatre

This is a play of two halves - the first half is about the creation of parks, the latter half is about the destruction of parks. The character at the centre of these opposing processes is the unchanging Robert Moses, played here by Ralph Fiennes as British acting royalty meets the subject of American biography royalty.

Moses is stubborn and motivated. While his single-minded determination to build roads – first to Long Island parks, then through Washington Square Park in Manhattan – and refusal to make any concessions to his critics encourage us to dislike him, David Hare’s writing and Nicholas Hytner’s direction create a complex figure and moments where we find ourselves empathising with Moses. He's portrayed as having a grouchy and sardonic sense of humour, with a more complicated emotional life than we initially imagine. It would have been very easy to make Moses out to be a straightforward tyrant, but he is nuanced and complicated.

Yet his stubbornness is his most persistent trait. He believes he is always right, that he knows best. Those who oppose him – rich landowners, middle class conservationists, slum dwellers – are there to be overcome by any means necessary and are not to be compromised with. Early on, we learn that he (or rather, his mother) has been forced to pay $22,000 as a fine resulting from building on someone else's land. He is embroiled in another lawsuit for going ahead on building work without permission from Al Smith, the governor, and has now done the same thing again. He sees his role as being to lead rather than follow, thinks he knows best what 'the people' want, and is willing to break the law to do something he perceives as being good for them. This disregard for democracy and its institutions, and his open opposition to the checks and balances they seek to impose on his power, has contemporary resonance. Like President Trump and Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Moses had no qualms about openly lying or ignoring the views of experts.

In other ways, this play is very much of its time. The twentieth century was the century of the automobile, with great infrastructure projects devoted to enabling people to drive more quickly and easily. It was a self-consciously modern form of transport, part of what the future looked like. Moses designed his roads specifically to avoid busses being able to use them, and never led any rapid transit projects. In 2022 the automobile remains dominant, but it does not appear to be the future as sustainability and efficiency are increasingly prioritised over convenience. One wonders what Moses' monumental projects would have been had he been born 100 years later, in 1988 rather than 1888.

Fiennes dominates this play. As he strides energetically about the stage especially in the first half (after the interval he is older, slower and spends more of his time behind a huge desk), he reminds us of Caro’s other great biographical subject, President Lyndon B. Johnson with his hands on his hips, shoulders back, and stomach thrust forward. Fiennes’ uses the physicality to great effect in making Moses’ raw power felt.

While Moses is the central character and everyone else consigned to supporting him in the first half, the other characters in his planning office become more prominent as the play progresses. Siobhan Cullen impresses as Finnuala Connell, an Irish woman who sticks with Moses for thirty years and admires his early idealism but comes to detest his unchanging and uncaring persona. Her colleague, Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett) has a different story – early in his career, he challenges Moses and tries to persuade him to make minor concessions to keep landowners on side. Later, he stays out of every confrontation and has become a defender of Moses. Mariah Heller (Alisha Bailey) only appears after the interval, but has an important role to play as a reminder to both Moses and Connell of their younger selves.

Danny Webb and Helen Schlesinger also put in good performances as Governor Al Smith and Jane Jacobs respectively. Smith is involved in the best scene of the play, an encounter in Moses’s office between the boss himself and the governor where the likeable Smith initially seems to have the upper hand but where, at some point, almost invisibly, the momentum shifts and Moses gets his way from the interaction. Jacobs, meanwhile, leads the campaign to make Washington Square a car-free zone. She appears frequently throughout the show, often in monologues, and her excellent performance deserves a character that is more closely intertwined with the rest of the characters.

The sense that Moses has spent a lifetime on truly game-changing infrastructure is enhanced by Bob Crowley’s set and Lily Mollgaard’s props. Much takes place within Moses’ office, with his workers in the background working away on boards. By the latter half of the play, these drawings of roads outside New York City have been replaced by models of bridges and skyscrapers. A starring role is played by the maps. Some of these take up the entire width of the stage, while others are more easily handled by the actors and actresses. It is worth getting a seat in either of the galleries purely to get a better vantage point of these maps. Their size helps us picture the scale of Moses’ projects, and the importance of the disputes that sprang from his plans.

It would have been easy for this play to devolve into a history lesson on a topic that is relatively obscure, especially to a British audience. Thankfully, despite a few early slips where exposition leads to forced and unnatural dialogue, this avoids falling into that trap. It is captivating, driven in no small part by Fiennes’ charisma, but helped also by its ability to tie in with modern debates about democracy and city planning, and by its telling of a very human story, a story of what motivates people and what they are capable of.

Straight Line Crazy is playing at the Bridge Theatre from 14 March to 18 June 2022. It has also been recorded for National Theatre Live.

-Christopher Day is currently a PhD student at the University of Westminster