A barnstorming, scenery-chewing Ralph Fiennes anchors David Hare’s new play about Robert Moses, who created parks for New York’s poor in the 1920s and by 1955 was ready to sacrifice Manhattan to the car...Nicolas Hytner’s production is by turns energetically brash and terribly baggy.
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So yes, the best David Hare play in an age, by some distance. It needs to be said, though, that for all its essential effectiveness – helped by Fiennes’s powerhouse performance – it’s still pretty clunky.
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Indeed more would be welcome, full-stop - without interval, the running time only stands at just over two hours, another half hour would be fine; Hare has alighted on a topic of monumental fascination. Call me crazy but Netflix should snap it up.
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To be fair, any playwright would struggle to do justice to a book that, if it were a play, would resemble one of those Robert Lepage chronicles that rumble on for six hours or more. If you’re familiar with the story as told by Caro, you’ll probably find Hare’s portrait too superficial, too cartoonish.
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It's stirring, engrossing stuff, smoothly directed by Nicholas Hytner, purring along at pace, and full of thought-provoking observations.
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Always a risk in a play like this, Hare lets his extensive fact-finding slip into dialogue too baldly...It’s the cast, really, that sustains an interesting, flawed portrait of a man who built bridges as fast as he burned them.
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The fundamental problem with Straight Line Crazy is that while Moses is an interesting enough man, we’re talking about roads. It’s not the most fascinating of backdrops anyway, but Hare feels determined to make the topic even harder to engage with.
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This is Hare’s most dramatically gripping and politically thoughtful play since The Absence of War three decades ago and provides another acting triumph for Fiennes...
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