The theatrical evils of town planning
Just back from Straight Line Crazy at the Bridge - David Hare’s new play with the excellent Ralph Fiennes playing Robert Moses, the New York State planner who totally changed the face of the State with his 30 years and more road building programme.
That a play about planning could be so engaging is a marvel, that a new play which is full of debate and argument without being didactic could be put on today is a greater marvel.
We are not supposed, of course, to like Moses, he was not, nor pretended to be, a likeable man. But neither was he a conscious rogue, although his dedication to the car (and his refusal to plan for mass transit) would now be considered heinous, as would (and rightly) his focus on the needs of the middle classes at the expense of the urban poor (who just happened, by chance, to be recent immigrants or black).
But his ‘slum clearance’ as he ploughed his roads through the poor areas of the Bronx was no different, in motive, to the post-war destruction of e.g. Deptford and its communities by the LCC’s socialist planners wanting to tear down the slums and move the population to bright new Tower blocks. It was all done for the best possible intentions.
But Moses was an unelected civil service tyrant, whose plans (which he would never alter) were eventually blocked by just those middle class activists he had been thinking he was working for. This is a play of dialogue and debate and nuance. Is someone who believes he is always right, and that he knows better than those he thinks he is helping what is good for them, a sinner or just ‘on the spectrum’ – or indeed a psychopath?
With a very fine turn, supporting Fiennes, from Danny Webb as the demotic State Governor A L Smith. A ‘thinking’ play and well worth seeing.