David Hare's The Permanent Way - Plus ça change

Let's call it the Osborne effect.  In the light of recent Governmental and Oppositional mediocrity, I sometimes find myself feeling kindly to once despised political figures of the past.  George Osborne, who was beyond the pale prior to Brexit, will often catch me unawares with the comparative common sense and compassionate liberalism of his Evening Standard editorials.  Likewise, I felt a stinging jolt of this kind when taking in Alexander Lass's revival of David Hare's play The Permanent Way at The Vaults, the theatre situated beneath Waterloo Station.  In Hare's play about the tragic consequences of the full privatisation of the railways, we are reminded that these final decisions took place on John Major's Prime Ministerial watch.  That many of us now regard Major as one of the voices of sanity railing against the ludicrous self-harm of Brexit, gives us a real pause for thought when the actors in the play turn their ire against the first post-Thatcher Prime Minister. 

"Britain, yeah, beautiful country ... Shame we can't run a railway!"

This also flags up the fact that we are dealing with a piece of work featuring events that are taking on the indistinct lustre of history.  Yet it is still a play with a remarkable amount of heft, one that fizzes with anger and buries its fangs deep into the reputations and legacies of the powerful.

The Permanent Way focuses on what is now widely regarded as the cause of the four great rail disasters that occurred between 1997 and 2002: the imbecilic separation of the organisations responsible for the trains and those that were responsible for the tracks.  This decision is mirrored allegorically by the dynamic that gives the play its power: the contrast between the politicians, bureaucrats and business interests, and, the victims and families impacted by the disasters.  We meet the former almost immediately: they trot smoothly into view, slickly offer up excuses, blame their counterparts, and immediately raise the hackles of the audience.  When the first survivors get to speak and we learn of their experiences through first-hand accounts - sometimes visceral, often shocking, and always moving - the human element of these stories show us what lengths the slippery and self-serving decision-makers will go to in order to cover their backs.  The catastrophes resulting from the separation of track and train are powerfully dramatized by the separation of the excuses of those with power and the stories of the victims and survivors of the disasters.  

The names associated with the four disasters that took place between 1997 and 2002 concertina into each other - Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar - leaving you scrambling in order to remember the details of each.  This is best illustrated with my own memory concerning one of the victims of the Ladbroke Grove rail crash.  Except I'd remembered it wrong.  The children's writer Nina Bawden was not present and did not lose her husband in the Ladbroke Grove train disaster.  Her horrific injuries and heartbreaking loss, in fact, took place at the Potter's Bar crash.  The temporal compression of these four disasters, nearly two decades distant now, and my misremembering, is indicative that there was something very rotten in the state of Britain's railways back then. 

Indeed, it is these victims and survivor stories - garnered from Hare's forensic one-on-one interviews - that give The Permanent Way its dramatic weight.  In contrast, Hare's most recent play, I'm not Running, was unsatisfactory.  Satirising the current state of UK politics felt flimsy because politics in 2019 has the ability to transform immensely - and often absurdly - in just a few hours.  Furthermore, the egotistical and/or ideological monsters that we now have in control have gone way beyond that play's two central characters.  One only needs to re-watch The Thick of It to realise that what was once mild hyperbole does not come close to the present shit-show.       

Yes, I remember Ladbroke Grove ...

Cut to the current impasse in Parliament and it's plus ça change.  The reckless attempts to rush through Boris Johnson's Brexit deal, without adequate scrutiny or economic impact assessments, are sure to come back and haunt us.  One exchange, a few days ago, between the Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick and BBC journalist Victoria Derbyshire was astonishing.  Fitzpatrick told Derbyshire that he intended to vote for Boris Johnson's Brexit Bill.  Derbyshire pressed him on the details, and in lines that could have been lifted directly from Hare's earlier play: 

Victoria Derbyshire: "Have you managed to read it? Genuine question." 

Jim Fitzpatrick: "No."

VD: "Have you tried?"

JF: "No."

VD: "You haven’t tried to read any of this?"

JF: "Not yet, no."

VD: "Or the explanatory notes?"

JF: “No."

VD: "Or the impact assessment?"

JF: "No."   

Fitzpatrick, of course, voted for Boris Johnson's deal last night.  Accountability isn't just being neglected, it is being deliberately dismissed and thrown out of the window.  And this is what makes the revival of a play like The Permanent Way timely and important.  Decisions have consequences and they do cost lives.  But unfortunately - and, sadly, this is perhaps the most important thing that you learn from Hare's play – with so many people clustered in the upper echelons of power, all willing to blame others and pass the buck, there will invariably be a hiding place for them all to take cover and avoid culpability.  How thoroughly depressing.  How ultimately tragic.