Inciting railway rage

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.