Comments included:

‘Extremely moving, a terrific piece of civic theatre… very powerful’ Tom Paulin

‘I loved it from the very beginning, I thought it was immensely powerful… It was about people, and the way they tell the things that happen to them… so moving’ Julie Myerson

‘it explodes into life… I really enjoyed it. It was a very lively and brilliant and well thought out play’ Tim Lott

I cannot remember when I last left a theatre feeling in such a state of pure fury as I did after seeing The Permanent Way. I intend a compliment. David Hare's dramatised documentary about the privatising of the railways is a theatrical red rag of an occasion that incites us to become raging bulls, even though its characters never raise their voices and always speak in a cool, restrained style.

The idea is to assemble evidence to demonstrate the botched, ideologically driven and dangerous state of our privatised railway system. Authentic eye or heart-witness accounts of people bereaved or disfigured in train crashes lends the reinforcing bulwark of emotion.

Max Stafford-Clark's superbly acted production for his Out of Joint Company in association with the National Theatre steers an eloquent, revealing course through a shoal of facts and recollections.

Mr Hare waves before our eyes the scandals of privatisation in an emotive and appalling survey of how successive governments thrust a new railway system upon us, whether we wanted it or not, and left us to suffer the bloody results while greedy bankers pocketed millions and ministers happily travelled on by chauffeur-driven limousine. So little for democracy.

Except when computerised graphics show video film of a train crash in slow motion, there is nothing spectacular, theatrical or revelatory about The Permanent Way. But as with Justifying War, the recent dramatisation of the Hutton Inquiry into David Kelly's death, a stage performance clarifies, vivifies and illuminates. The production is based upon actors' interviews with unnamed people who are all linked to privatisation - from a High Powered Treasury Thinker and A Very Experienced Engineer to a Bereaved Mother. Hare has neatly woven these characters together, as if embroidering a great Victorian tapestry that illustrates How They Ruined Our Railways.

On a bare stage, with backcloths of computerised timetables and nostalgic rural advertisements, nine actors play about 30 characters, mainly delivering monologues of accusation, exposure and explanation. The script's flaw is its lack of a choric voice - a transport specialist or some political writer such as Will Hutton - to put the case for retaining railways in public ownership or control. But there is no dearth of forceful speaking. Everyone, whether proponents or opponents of privatisation, apart from a self-pitying Managing Director of Railtrack (wonderful Ian Redford) concede the system was flawed in practice.

A troop of cynical commuters, miming life in an overpacked carriage, fire a barrage of complaints. The Treasury had always refused to subsidise railways when they were publicly owned but now they are subsidised more lavishly than ever. The High Powered Treasury Thinker, whom Ian Redford - again - endows with a nice, smug hauteur, confesses the train-operating franchises "gave the train operators more interest in making money than in quality of service".

As for safety, The Permanent Way reminds you it comes at a price which is just not affordable in a profit-orientated industry.

Nigel Cooke's memorably shocked British Transport policeman leads into The Permanent Way's heart of darkness, with reports of recent rail crashes which left many dead or maimed, flaws and failures exposed, no one prosecuted. Bella Merlin and Flaminia Cinque speak with devastating emotional impact as campaigning mothers who lost adult sons in crashes and have rebelled against the soothing, empty consolations of officialdom.

Welcome to inflammatory theatre.

I WENT to York on an express that was packed to its metal gills and running late, but still it seemed to me a good way to travel because I knew that David Hare’s latest play was about the railways and I myself was once a keen train-spotter who took particular delight in taking the numbers of the puffers at King’s Cross. I travelled back to London holding nervously on to my seat and wishing I was going by helicopter, canal boat, anything but a train.

The thesis of The Permanent Way, which reaches the National Theatre in January, is that we’re paying far too heavily for a privatisation that even Margaret Thatcher did not want. We are doing so not just through fares that are scandalously high, given the unreliability of services, but through danger and disaster. And the 100-minute piece which makes this case is disturbing enough to merit comparison with any of the state-of-Britain plays that became known as the Hare Trilogy.

But as presented by the touring company Out of Joint, The Permanent Way is very different from the fictional Racing Demon or semi-fictional The Absence of War. Mainly, it consists of selections from Hare’s interviews with everyone from the former head of Railtrack to Nina Bawden, who lost her husband at Potters Bar. You learn what it’s like to hear that your dead son smelt like “human barbecue” and how it feels to come bouncing off the rails at 100mph.

Hare prepares us carefully for these horrors. Max Stafford-Clark’s excellent nine-person cast, crammed together and lurching over the set’s few chairs, begin by evoking the lunatic stoicism of the British public. Then it’s over to Whitehall mandarins and investment bankers who coolly anatomise and regret a privatisation that would seem comically botched and illogical — imagine a restaurant whose cooks, waiters and washers-up work for different companies — were it not for the consequences as Hare’s cast evokes them.

Southall: a driver untrained in using warning systems that anyway weren’t operating. Ladbroke Grove: a red signal whose near-invisibility was well known. Hatfield: a faulty but neglected rail. Potters Bar: catastrophic points. And so to deaths, inquiries that achieved little, distressing conflicts between survivors’ and bereaved groups, and lasting pain. The voices include outraged parents, the incisive, outspoken transport policeman who was quietly sidelined after Ladbroke Grove, the executive whose thoughts at Hatfield seem only to have been for his company’s future, and John Prescott, who emerges as the smug, stupid, devious, self-serving spokesman of a deeply untrustworthy Government.

Is Hare fair? Isn’t Stafford-Clark’s scariest back-projection, a wild, splintering derailment, an appeal to the emotions rather than the mind? I myself interviewed the wife of one of the 120 who died at Orpington in 1957, and she blamed British Rail, with reason.

Nationalisation doesn’t guarantee safety. But Hare has still made a serious, provocative, dramatically gripping contribution to an argument of urgent interest to us all.

“PEOPLE who want to talk about railways are by definition nerds. If there’s a play in there I’m amazed,” says one of the interviewees recreated on stage in David Hare’s The Permanent Way. I also would have been amazed if this had turned into a proper play for this is testimonial theatre, not drama, but no less worthy of a stage.

The Permanent Way argues that the privatisation of the railways prized management skills more than engineering know-how, profit more than maintenance, and led to danger and disaster. It’s an edited mosaic of interviews under-taken by Hare and the cast in which we hear from civil servants, bankers, rail engineers, transport policemen and, most affectingly, the survivors of the Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar crashes and the bereaved.

Max Stafford-Clark’s Out of Joint/National Theatre touring production begins with carriage-packed commuters relating their woes about the country. One passenger repeatedly asks why we haven’t been more militant as a result. That’s Hare’s intention with this piece, to be as emotive as a computer simulation of the Hatfield crash, to galvanise shared opinion rather than win hearts and minds.

So don’t expect to hear any sustained counter-arguments about how the railways fared under public ownership or find sympathetic portrayals of privatisation’s defenders; John Prescott is reduced to a panto figure with the impotent, post-crash response: “This must never happen again.”

Yet the play is full of telling details: the multiple subcontracting that leaves the workers maintaining the track (known as the permanent way) unsure who they are working for; the tensions that grow between the crash survivors and the grieving relatives; the way a campaigning mother adopts her late son’s lawyer-like style of questioning.

The multi-tasking cast perform on a mostly bare stage, with scene-setting back projections, including nostalgic train posters and a departure board that chillingly rattles out the next ill-fated train. In a fine ensemble, Ian Redford brings a dignity to Gerald Corbett, the former head of Railtrack, Lloyd Hutchinson is a union leader one moment, a hilariously brand-obsessed Richard Branson the next, and Bella Merlin and Flaminia Cinque are touching as grieving mothers in search of apologies.

What comes through most powerfully by the end is our current culture of inertia, buck-passing and lack of government action. As Kika Markham puts it movingly as the author Nina Bawden, who lost her husband at Potters Bar: “I never believed in corruption before. I’m not talking about greased palms or bribes. I’m talking about the idea of corruption, it being in everyone’s interests — the politicians, Railtrack, Jarvis — to do nothing.” For that alone, this production is worth a visit.

Verdict: Exhilarating run on the righteous track

Here’s a funny thing: a new play is expressing exactly what the audience feels about life in Britain today. Nothing works. You can’t get anywhere. The roads are choked and pitted with holes. And if you go on a train, you take your life in your hands.

Sir David Hare’s new documentary drama is about the disasters on the railway, ironically known as the ‘permanent way’, in the past ten years. Researched with the actors who perform it, the words are mostly taken from survivors, railway engineers, civil servants and businessmen.

Oh, and John Prescott, who raises a huge laugh whenever he appears. The scandalous four crashes since 1997 – at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar – have left a legacy of confusion, inertia, refusal to take blame and no government commitment to take drastic action.

The well-known author Nina Bawden was in the crash at Potters Bar with her husband. He died. The bereaved have stuck together in what Ms Bawden calls a spirit of hysterical friendship.

The play is beautifully shaped around the collected testimonies, and staged with utter simplicity and flashes of brilliance. There is even a terrifying virtual reality film of the Hatfield crash on the GNER line to Leeds.

Apart from that, just nine actors on a bare stage, a mass of incriminating detail and a rising tide of anger.

David Hare's indictment of rail privatisation is partial, convincing and wholly memorable.

The Permanent Way. Not the Third Way. David Hare and Max Stafford-Clark have joined forces, as writer and director, to stage a lament for the railways. But their real subject is much larger. This absorbing, provocative documentary is an indictment of Blair's Britain.

Why did a Labour Party, vociferous in opposition to what was clearly a botched privatisation proposal, do nothing to reverse it when they came to power? Why have we put up with a culture that values management facility over engineering skills? How have we come to accept Richard Branson breezily proclaiming a more 'customer-oriented' service, while trains drop out, run late, or skid off the rails without explanation? Why did everyone simply shrug when, on the way back from rail-friendly York, my train shuddered to a sudden halt?

The Permanent Way doesn't offer solutions to these questions, any more than it claims to be impartial: it's a series of protests and demands, not a programme for change. It draws on a deep well of feeling and assumptions: for the British, the railways are like cricket - something 'we' invented, extolled, exported, and then ceased to be any good at.

Nostalgia and gathering disappointment are cleverly evoked in William Dudley's design. It begins in sunshine, with a British Railways poster (c.1920) showing a sleepy, custard-coloured landscape which suddenly zips into life as a bottle-green train appears in its depths, steaming towards the spectators. It moves through a video of stations and those old louvred noticeboards that flap over to show destinations. For most of the scenes involving the recent past, the stage is blank and grey. It's a revealing arena, in which documentary reportage - the most important new theatrical form - is animated with complete conviction.

Stafford-Clark is a master at reportage - one of the few proponents of non-fiction theatre, alongside directors at the Tricycle and the Arcola. But this marks a welcome return to full-on engagement with public affairs for Hare who, after his state-of-the-nation dramas for the National, went on a feminist, the-personal-is-political loop before producing his bold Middle Eastern monologue, Via Dolorosa.

The playwright and his cast have interviewed scores of people whose lives have been touched by the state of the railways in the 10 years since privatisation. The verbatim accounts of some 40 characters - passengers, engineers, trades union officials, Treasury mandarins - have been brought together by the dramatist; their words are delivered by nine dexterous multitasking actors with (apart from one artsy mime at the beginning) an exceptional transparency.

There's the civil servant who agrees that he was committed to pushing through 'a folly' and the rail executive who describes the Balkanisation of the railways as 'complete disaster'. Then there are those whose lives have been wrecked by the four fatal crashes of these years. A woman whose son was killed in the Southall crash explains that he'd been training to be a solicitor: in the office, 'they couldn't believe how clever he was, coming from Essex', and that, as a campaigner, she's taken on some of his legal precision. She found out about his death when the Met closed their casualty bureau and put his name up on Ceefax.

From these statements - far more memorable for being embodied rather than simply read - some specific, resonant points arise. These alone would make The Permanent Way worth seeing. Advanced Train Protection systems haven't been enforced. The notion of corporate manslaughter has been dodged. Transport police, expert in dealing with crashes, have been prevented from investigating accidents.

Of course, even taken together, these facts don't amount to an argument: they don't identify a cause or a culprit - and of course, accidents occurred before privatisation. Which isn't to say there's no blame. It lies in a culture of inertia and non-accountability.

The writer Nina Bawden, whose husband was killed in the Potter's Bar crash and who was herself badly injured, puts it most succinctly: 'I never believed in corruption before. I'm not talking about greased palms, or bribes. I'm talking about the idea of corruption, it being in everyone's interests - the politicians, Railtrack, Jarvis - to do nothing'.

How can you make a play about railways? Like this.

'People who want to talk about railways are by definition nerds. If there's a play in there, I'm amazed." Let's get one thing clear. The high-powered Treasury figure confronted by one of the actor/ researchers for The Permanent Way, thinks subject-matter is the same as drama. Wrong. The question, "What's it about?" - in this case such grindingly unfashionable concerns as railways, engineering, privatisation and political responsibility - doesn't give the remotest idea of what this utterly arresting and urgent play is like.

David Hare is often his own worst enemy, his particular viewpoint strangling drama which means you get polemic where there should be a play. But his best work, like Racing Demon, Via Dolorosa and his TV film Licking Hitler, has a properly complicated and truly exhilarating breadth of sympathy.

All this time, he has (happily) never recovered from reading Angus Calder's groundbreaking book The People's War, a magnificent account of the Second World War through the eyes of ordinary people who lived through it. And that's what you get here. The Permanent Way is nothing less - but a whole lot more - than beautifully edited and acted testimonials of hundreds of people from that Treasury man to survivors of Southall and Ladroke Grove, the Transport Police, investment bankers, railway workers and the vicar of Hatfield. In other words, an engrossing political history of the privatisation of the railways through the mouths of those who lived and died through it. So, fully balanced compassion then? Not quite. To its infinite dramatic advantage, rage, careful and cold-eyed, simmers throughout. "You say it's a play? You don't think it's a book?" queries a senior rail executive. Absolutely not. Under the exacting eye of director Max Stafford-Clark, this entire production understands the power of what not to say. A bereaved mother climbs from devastation at her son's death to a meeting with evasive, blustering John Prescott. Her dedication stabs at your heart; the father's eloquent silence breaks it.

I wouldn't call myself a regular theatre-goer, but when a release about the play came in the post, the title attracted me. "The Permanent Way"? That's the job me and the lads do! So I went down and bought some tickets. So many people wanted to come that in the end there were 39 of us at the theatre last Friday - some station staff, a train driver, families and a dozen permanent way lads.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much. I'd learnt my lesson with Ken Loach's film about rail privatisation, The Navigators, which I'd been a little disappointed with. But in all honesty, we were really blown away. You see, despite the title, the play isn't really about us p-way (that's what we call the permanent way) workers: it's about people from the city, like the technical directors, commuters, bereaved families, but very few railway workers. It wasn't done from our persepective, and it wasn't meant to do so, but we recognised these people and these events, and it is done very powerfully.

There was a part that depicted the Hatfield crash with some really clever graphics; a couple of us had been involved in that incident. One of the girls started crying and then I thought, Uh oh, maybe I shouldn't have brought them all. But afterwards they all said that they were glad to have seen it. It wasn't cheering, but it was thought-provoking, and I learned a lot from it.

For example, I'm not one for newspapers - I don't like the way they go on about all the gory details, I just want to know what's happened - so I hadn't known about the rift between the victims' families and the bereavement support groups after some of the crashes. That was really interesting. Also, no one came out of it smelling of roses, so you could see it was a very balanced play. The actors were marvellous, too, particularly the way they played multiple parts.

But it slightly depressed me, the play. It really brings home the message that privatisation doesn't work, and everyone knows it, and that another crash will happen unless something changes.

Even so, we weren't depressed. We all went for a curry afterwards and couldn't stop talking about it. The lads and I were still talking about it this morning.

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

"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.

FOUR STARS

A world premiere of a David Hare play in York - what on earth is happening? Well, clearly co-producers Out of Joint and the National Theatre have realised just how much affection the railway garners in the city; one only has to take a walk around the National Railway Museum to confirm this.

At the very heart of The Permanent Way is the theme of caring - or, rather, not caring - about railways. Tired commuters and sad trainspotters alike will be able to tell you about the past and present state of our privatised railways and yet no one has quite managed to rake through the leaves and come up with the facts until now.

Hare's observations are based on concrete evidence. This series of monologues about the political, social, intelligent and human voices behind the privatisation process is presented by nine actors who play 26 characters between them - including victims of the Southall, Paddington and Hatfield crashes, as well as John Prescott, and an MD of Railtrack. Hare gathered these witness accounts and then he and the company workshopped the material. The results slaughter what is left of a maligned national institution.

The fantastic monologue from "a British Transport Policeman" (Nigel Cooke) who witnessed not one but two crashes is one of the most memorable, showing that he was one of the few human voices in authority to deal competently with such an event.

The actors work against a backdrop video production that at first serves as an electronic timetable, and then suddenly springs into life and shows a train hurtling towards a crash and inevitable fatalities. William Dudley has designed a piece of imagery that immediately brings the message home.

The performers handle the stockpile of words well, while Max Stafford-Clark, collaborating with Hare for the first time since 1975, keeps the show on track by regularly shunting everyone around at a varying pace.

Hare has written an interesting piece of political theatre and has presented the facts to an audience to dissect as they will. The only question remaining is, 'Do we care enough about the railways to listen to what Hare has to say?'