STAGE STRAIGHT LINE CRAZY

Bridge Theatre, London until June 18 bridgetheatre.co.uk

Ralph Fiennes gives a typically towering performance in David Hare’s new play about legendary and divisive New York city planner Robert Moses.

Moses shaped the modern metropolis for 40 years from 1924, especially its arterial highways, often carving them through densely populated slums. His autocratic vision of urban renewal was latterly accused of social cleansing.

He venerated the automobile as the motor of social mobility but obstructed mass bus and rail networks, essential for the lower classes. Improved quality of life but perhaps only for the right sort of masses?

The script is packed with witty soundbites and smart, albeit didactic, observations about preservation versus progress, society’s hypocritical distaste for necessity over niceties and how the poorest always lose out, whether to liberal idealism or pitiless pragmatism. However, this play about the streets of New York is resolutely set indoors with maps and models. Despite Moses’ frequent blustering (especially at an entertainingly hammy Danny Webb as Governor Al Smith), it feels often inert and reliant on laborious explanations.

Although Straight Line Crazy is rooted in the very human costs to all involved, Moses, fictional colleagues Finnuala and Ariel (a strong Siobhan Cullen and Samuel Barnett) and the wider communities are so thinly sketched that it barely feels like it’s about real people at all, just straight lines on a page.