![]() ![]() Self-important, arrogant, detached and fanatical, Fiennes’s magnetic Moses is a case study in the advantages and dangers of (nominally) benevolent dictatorship. Crucially, though, it’s a play about how much Moses doesn’t change as much as how he does: key is the fact that what makes him a progressive revolutionary in the first half makes him a borderline monster in the second. You’d have to look it up to determine how old Moses is actually supposed to be in either timeline (Fiennes wears a toupee in ’26 and has a limp in ’55, it’s not aggressively transformative). What’s particularly effective is that ‘Straight Line Crazy’ shuns the traditional cradle-to-grave biographical format, and instead shows the unelected Moses at just two junctures in his life, in 19. ‘Straight Line Crazy’ reconvenes Hare, actor Ralph Fiennes and director Nicholas Hytner for an altogether more substantial work than ‘Beat the Devil’, the theoretically admirable, actually half-baked monologue that reopened the Bridge Theatre after the first lockdown. More specifically, he’s on to something in sensing that the relatively obscure (in the UK, anyway) New York city planner Bob Moses would make a great subject for a biographical drama. But while it’s no masterpiece, he’s definitely on to something with ‘Straight Line Crazy’. ![]() David Hare has indubitably managed to parlay the fact that he wrote some great plays in the twentieth century into getting some truly rancid ones commissioned in the twenty-first. ![]()
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