David Hare's new play is about railway privatisation - but it is also a powerful revelation of the state we are in, says Michael Billington
Monday November 17, 2003
The Guardian
"I can't imagine why you want to write a play about the railways. It's an incredibly boring subject." So says a Treasury mandarin in David Hare's The Permanent Way, which deals with railway privatisation. But not only is the subject fascinating, it opens up endless lines of enquiry about the state of Britain - and kept a packed house at the Theatre Royal, York manifestly rapt.
Co-produced by Out of Joint and the National Theatre, the show is based on first-hand research by Hare, the actors and the director, Max Stafford-Clark. They have talked to dozens of people about railway-privatisation and its consequences: civil servants, investment bankers, rail engineers, transport policemen and, most movingly, survivors of four successive crashes and relatives of those who died. What emerges is a dazzling oral mosaic about the failure of a system. But, gripping as the evening is, it exposes some of the limitations, as well as the vast strengths, of this kind of documentary theatre.
The show begins brilliantly with William Dudley's transport poster of an idyllic rural England acquiring kinetic life as a train roars down a track: a reminder of the romance of the railways before we get to the grim reality. After a prologue made up of a litany of "customer" complaints, the show goes straight to the heart of the matter: the Major government's disgraceful decision to sell off a prime national asset as quickly and cheaply as possible. As a senior rail executive says, "Everyone knows the Balkanisation was a complete disaster. The thing was broken up into 113 pieces, like beads thrown on to a table."
What clearly stirs Hare and the company, however, are the human consequences of a half-baked political decision, in particular the elevation of profit above safety that led to a succession of disasters at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar. Listening to the testimony of those intimately involved, one is struck by their instinctive eloquence as well as their determination to get to the truth. After Southall, the bereaved mother of a hotshot lawyer sets up a Disaster Action Group and finds herself acquiring her late son's forensic skill: "I would find myself saying things like, 'I put it to you'. It was like he was at my side. Peter was on my shoulder."
Hare lets people speak movingly for themselves. But he also shapes and orchestrates the material, highlighting the way disaster exposes human vulnerability and divides as well as unifies. After the Ladbroke Grove crash, a young businessman goes straight to the office and covertly delights in the attentions of "all the good-looking women". A gulf also opens up between the survivors' group and the bereaved. The former accuse the latter of seeking a scapegoat: "One of their ideas was to set fire to the chairman of Railtrack on the steps of the inquiry." For her part, a bereaved mother is shocked when a Ladbroke Grove survivor writes in a newspaper that she had woken to "the smell of human barbecue." As in a Neil LaBute play, we're reminded that people don't always behave perfectly under stress.
The overwhelming virtue of The Permanent Way, however, is that it never lets us forget that people died and suffered because of a bungled privatisation, in particular the fatal decision to divide track from trains and operation from maintenance. You can point to fictional dramas where people are sacrificed to profit: in Ibsen's Pillars of Society the hero's son stows away aboard a ship that his father knows to be unseaworthy; in Arthur Miller's All My Sons a father again unwittingly kills his son by permitting defective parts to be fitted to airforce planes. But, while these are powerful tragedies, the horror of The Permanent Way lies in its origins in fact. As Shakespeare says in the sub-title to Henry VIII, All Is True.
But, precisely because the charges are so grave, I wish Hare and the Out of Joint team had pursued their researches still further. John Prescott is the only politician who appears in the show; but he is largely reduced to an impotent fall-guy standing helplessly in front of the cameras, after successive disasters, bleating: "This must never happen again." But one wonders if any attempt was made to interview Prescott, who was left trying to make an impossible privatisation work, or whether there was any approach to John Major, who was the chief political instigator of what turned out to be a privatisation too far.
The strength of this kind of documentary theatre is that it gives voice to ordinary people and exposes the flaws in the system; its limitation is that it is bound by its own terms of reference. In other words, there are times when you wish Hare could intervene and follow up some of the arguments. By ridiculing Prescott, the show implies that Labour should have instantly re-nationalised the railways on taking office in 1997. Of course; but the play never addresses the fact that they would then have had to spend billions compensating shareholders. Hare also never acknowledges that the situation has changed since the play was conceived: only this month it was announced that Network Rail was to take over responsibility for rail maintenance from private contractors. A step in the right direction that the play never discusses.
But the big question is whether the railways can be seen as a metaphor for modern Britain: a land where nothing works. It is a point Hare has made repeatedly in accompanying interviews and that is vividly expressed in the play's prologue by anguished travellers: "We're all doing our best but it isn't working," says someone, apparently speaking of the country as a whole. There is a danger, however, of falling into an apocalyptic, media-driven vision of modern Britain in which everything - transport, health, education - is in a state of insupportable chaos. This simply isn't so, and I think those on the left should be wary of endorsing the orchestrated hysteria of the axe-grinding right.
Those cavils aside, The Permanent Way is an astonishing piece of theatre. Max Stafford-Clark's production has a beautiful, text-led simplicity. William Dudley's design, dominated by a metallic frame, has one shattering piece of video footage in which a high-speed train racing towards us tilts and buckles as it goes off the rails. And no praise is too high for the actor-researchers including Ian Redford as a series of apologetic authority-figures, Lloyd Hutchinson as both a union-boss and a squadron leader caught up in the Potters Bar crash, Kika Markham as a widowed survivor and a campaigning solicitor, and Flaminia Cinque as a bereaved mother who challenges the high and mighty. Whatever its status as national metaphor, this intricately detailed study of a fatal privatisation is that very rare thing: a vitally necessary piece of theatre.
Monday November 17, 2003
The Guardian
"I can't imagine why you want to write a play about the railways. It's an incredibly boring subject." So says a Treasury mandarin in David Hare's The Permanent Way, which deals with railway privatisation. But not only is the subject fascinating, it opens up endless lines of enquiry about the state of Britain - and kept a packed house at the Theatre Royal, York manifestly rapt.
Co-produced by Out of Joint and the National Theatre, the show is based on first-hand research by Hare, the actors and the director, Max Stafford-Clark. They have talked to dozens of people about railway-privatisation and its consequences: civil servants, investment bankers, rail engineers, transport policemen and, most movingly, survivors of four successive crashes and relatives of those who died. What emerges is a dazzling oral mosaic about the failure of a system. But, gripping as the evening is, it exposes some of the limitations, as well as the vast strengths, of this kind of documentary theatre.
The show begins brilliantly with William Dudley's transport poster of an idyllic rural England acquiring kinetic life as a train roars down a track: a reminder of the romance of the railways before we get to the grim reality. After a prologue made up of a litany of "customer" complaints, the show goes straight to the heart of the matter: the Major government's disgraceful decision to sell off a prime national asset as quickly and cheaply as possible. As a senior rail executive says, "Everyone knows the Balkanisation was a complete disaster. The thing was broken up into 113 pieces, like beads thrown on to a table."
What clearly stirs Hare and the company, however, are the human consequences of a half-baked political decision, in particular the elevation of profit above safety that led to a succession of disasters at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar. Listening to the testimony of those intimately involved, one is struck by their instinctive eloquence as well as their determination to get to the truth. After Southall, the bereaved mother of a hotshot lawyer sets up a Disaster Action Group and finds herself acquiring her late son's forensic skill: "I would find myself saying things like, 'I put it to you'. It was like he was at my side. Peter was on my shoulder."
Hare lets people speak movingly for themselves. But he also shapes and orchestrates the material, highlighting the way disaster exposes human vulnerability and divides as well as unifies. After the Ladbroke Grove crash, a young businessman goes straight to the office and covertly delights in the attentions of "all the good-looking women". A gulf also opens up between the survivors' group and the bereaved. The former accuse the latter of seeking a scapegoat: "One of their ideas was to set fire to the chairman of Railtrack on the steps of the inquiry." For her part, a bereaved mother is shocked when a Ladbroke Grove survivor writes in a newspaper that she had woken to "the smell of human barbecue." As in a Neil LaBute play, we're reminded that people don't always behave perfectly under stress.
The overwhelming virtue of The Permanent Way, however, is that it never lets us forget that people died and suffered because of a bungled privatisation, in particular the fatal decision to divide track from trains and operation from maintenance. You can point to fictional dramas where people are sacrificed to profit: in Ibsen's Pillars of Society the hero's son stows away aboard a ship that his father knows to be unseaworthy; in Arthur Miller's All My Sons a father again unwittingly kills his son by permitting defective parts to be fitted to airforce planes. But, while these are powerful tragedies, the horror of The Permanent Way lies in its origins in fact. As Shakespeare says in the sub-title to Henry VIII, All Is True.
But, precisely because the charges are so grave, I wish Hare and the Out of Joint team had pursued their researches still further. John Prescott is the only politician who appears in the show; but he is largely reduced to an impotent fall-guy standing helplessly in front of the cameras, after successive disasters, bleating: "This must never happen again." But one wonders if any attempt was made to interview Prescott, who was left trying to make an impossible privatisation work, or whether there was any approach to John Major, who was the chief political instigator of what turned out to be a privatisation too far.
The strength of this kind of documentary theatre is that it gives voice to ordinary people and exposes the flaws in the system; its limitation is that it is bound by its own terms of reference. In other words, there are times when you wish Hare could intervene and follow up some of the arguments. By ridiculing Prescott, the show implies that Labour should have instantly re-nationalised the railways on taking office in 1997. Of course; but the play never addresses the fact that they would then have had to spend billions compensating shareholders. Hare also never acknowledges that the situation has changed since the play was conceived: only this month it was announced that Network Rail was to take over responsibility for rail maintenance from private contractors. A step in the right direction that the play never discusses.
But the big question is whether the railways can be seen as a metaphor for modern Britain: a land where nothing works. It is a point Hare has made repeatedly in accompanying interviews and that is vividly expressed in the play's prologue by anguished travellers: "We're all doing our best but it isn't working," says someone, apparently speaking of the country as a whole. There is a danger, however, of falling into an apocalyptic, media-driven vision of modern Britain in which everything - transport, health, education - is in a state of insupportable chaos. This simply isn't so, and I think those on the left should be wary of endorsing the orchestrated hysteria of the axe-grinding right.
Those cavils aside, The Permanent Way is an astonishing piece of theatre. Max Stafford-Clark's production has a beautiful, text-led simplicity. William Dudley's design, dominated by a metallic frame, has one shattering piece of video footage in which a high-speed train racing towards us tilts and buckles as it goes off the rails. And no praise is too high for the actor-researchers including Ian Redford as a series of apologetic authority-figures, Lloyd Hutchinson as both a union-boss and a squadron leader caught up in the Potters Bar crash, Kika Markham as a widowed survivor and a campaigning solicitor, and Flaminia Cinque as a bereaved mother who challenges the high and mighty. Whatever its status as national metaphor, this intricately detailed study of a fatal privatisation is that very rare thing: a vitally necessary piece of theatre.
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