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.