Railroaded
By Terry Stoller
The Permanent Way
By David Hare
National Theatre, London
Box office: (44) 020-7452-3000
David Hare’s new play The Permanent
Way is so topical that the day after it opened at the National
Theatre in London, the same subject was covered by The Independent
under the headline, “Britain’s Chaotic Railways.” The government
ran the British rail system until the early 1990s, when it was
privatized and, as a character in the play puts it, “Balkanized.”
That means the trains are owned by the banks and rented to train-operating
companies, while the tracks are overseen by other companies that
hire subcontractors to do the work. The new system values the
bottom line over engineering and maintenance of the rails and
is seriously compromised, according to Ian Jack in his book The
Crash That Stopped Britain. Using Jack’s book as background
and urged on by director Max Stafford-Clark, Hare, along with
actors under the auspices of Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint Theatre,
took a close look at the growing transportation problem, interviewing
rail managers and employees, businesspeople involved with the
privatization, passengers and relatives whose lives had been impacted
by a number of fatal train accidents. Those interviews form the
basis of Hare’s play.
Although the piece draws on the testimony
of actual people, the characters in Permanent Way have
been given generic titles like “A High-Powered Treasury Thinker,”
“A Managing Director of Railtrack,” “A Leading Entrepreneur,”
“A Widow.” Still, when I saw the production, audience members
laughed in recognition of certain portrayals, and journalists
writing about the play put real names to some of those characters:
the manager director was Gerald Corbett, the leading entrepreneur
was Richard Branson, and the widow was novelist Nina Bawden, who
lost her husband and was injured herself in one of the accidents
that the play explores. When using testimony presumably in the
public record, Hare identifies the speakers, in particular the
deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. Whether Hare is protecting
the generically named interviewees or was not given permission
to identify his sources is not clear. Certainly an issue of privacy
arises in oral-testimony works performed for the public and preserved
in a script, and not naming the actual people can help secure
their privacy.
The play begins with a prologue of complaints
voiced by a group of passengers and staged by Stafford-Clark as
a funny and lively opening number. The actors, each carrying the
requisite commuter newspaper, mime traveling in a railway car
and mouth off about the Tories, the Labor government, the Underground--becoming
passionate about how nothing works in Britain, especially the
“stupid” railway system. The rest of the presentation is primarily
a series of talking heads. On a relatively bare stage, actors,
playing multiple roles, wear iconic costume pieces to identify
their characters, sit in different types of chairs, stand in various
configurations and mostly use direct address to the audience.
Back-wall projections offer a nostalgic vision of railway travel
as a train comes alive in a vintage poster and chugs down the
track; a disheartening contemporary view of a train stop in need
of repair; an arrivals-and-departures board on which the names
of stations that have become synonymous with tragedy get ticked
off; and later a view of a horrifying train disaster. But what
makes this presentation “a good night out” is the compelling material
of the first-hand accounts.
The story of Permanent Way sketches
the background of privatization and its implementation as told
by the treasury thinker, a civil servant and an investment banker.
Each concedes that the scheme went wrong, but none takes responsibility
for its failures. Later, a transport policeman reveals that an
investigation into one accident, in which seven people were killed
and over a hundred injured, showed that one safety system wasn’t
working and another hadn’t been switched on--though it would have
been of no help as the driver hadn’t been trained to use it because
of company cutbacks. The testimony of parents whose children died
in the accidents and survivors of those accidents put a terrible
personal face on the tragedies. These accounts of loss and trauma
are undeniably powerful.
An ensemble of marvelous actors--among
them Kika Markham and Out of Joint veteran Ian Redford--portray
the wide range of characters, from the policeman in charge of
the crash investigation whose disgust at the stonewalling by the
rail companies and the government drives him to quit the force,
to the founder of a survivors’ group who is so badly burned she
wears a plastic mask, to a young survivor who experiences delayed
shock and eventually finds a job close to home so that he can
avoid train travel, to a bereaved mother who responds to the loss
of her son by becoming a social activist.
Hare has achieved an effective balance
in his play between information, agit-prop and moving personal
narrative. He is conscious of the difficulties of dramatizing
the subject matter, and more than one interviewee in the play
express reservations about making a theatre piece on the subject
of the rails: one thinks it might be boring, another that a book
would be more appropriate. Indeed, Hare includes a number of intertextual
references. Periodically, a character will use his name: “David”
(although according to the program notes, a group participated
in the interview process). And one character refers to her anxiety
about what she’d say when she got to the National Theatre, adding:
“I’m grateful to you. You’ve let me come in and talk about something
serious.” These interjections remind the audience that the play
is based on actualities and that these are real people speaking.
Some are self-serving, particularly the line just quoted, but
they are effective nevertheless.
Some reviewers have complained about the
bias in the piece, noting the lack of full testimony from Prescott,
who is confined to one-liners. In fact, he is used as a comic
device, popping up to deliver brief platitudes. Still, the piece
firmly takes a point of view. There is something seriously wrong
with the railway system, it says, and both business and government
are at fault. Hare and Stafford-Clark are no strangers to political
theatre or docudrama, having a history of creating such pieces
both together and individually.
As an American, I found that much of the
play didn’t have the resonance that it did for the British public,
who rely on the rail system for transportation, although after
seeing the play, I decided to not take any train trips out of
London. What did resonate was the individual stories and the willingness
of people to share their experiences for this project. And spending
an evening at a cultural institution where a play about a topical
issue was a hot theatrical event made me particularly happy.
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