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.
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