Rehearsal images have been released for David Hare’s award-winning play The Permanent Way, which roars to life in a provocative new site-specific staging performed in The Vaults, London’s alternative subterranean venue beneath Waterloo Station, running from Friday 13 September – Sunday 17 November.
Revelatory, witty, and moving, The Permanent Way is an astonishing interrogation of the chaos arising from the botched privatisation of Britain’s railways. Told through the first-hand accounts of those involved at every level, from passengers to Civil Service mandarins, this extraordinary verbatim piece asks challenging questions of responsibility and governmental mismanagement. Have we learned anything from recent history?
David Hare said, “I had hoped my 2003 play would become outdated. But the latest Independent review in 2019 proves the truth of what the play argued over 15 years ago: that the state of the railways is a whacking great distressing metaphor for just how badly the British were governed, and how even more hopelessly badly they’re governed today.”
