Infamy, power and privilege are the themes of Katherine Moar’s short, snappy and hugely enjoyable second play. It’s inspired by Patty Hearst, the media heiress kidnapped by purported US guerilla group the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and later convicted of robbing banks with them, though she was coerced and raped. Moar’s debut, Farm Hall, was about the Allies eavesdropping on captured German atomic scientists in a country house, and it transferred from Jermyn St to the Haymarket. Diffuse ideas spark interestingly in this writer’s mind.
We observe the rich girl and her lawyer during her trial but first meet them 40 years later, when she’s been exonerated and he is seeking her testimonial against unnamed allegations, presumably related to MeToo. Perhaps for legal reasons they’ve been renamed, though they share quite a bit of backstory with Hearst and her real-life attorney F. Lee Bailey, who also defended OJ Simpson and the Boston Strangler. The play’s title is a red herring as neat and oblique as the word “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’s critique of Patty’s plutocrat grandfather, WR Hearst.
