New train of events

It was a long essay by Ian Jack that started it. In 2001, the editor of Granta magazine published a tiny book called The Crash That Stopped Britain one year after the Hatfield disaster.

In it he mourned the golden age of rail travel and blamed the modern decline of the railways on the Conservative policy of privatisation.

Max Stafford-Clark, artistic director of Out Of Joint, read the book and found himself nodding. 'I've always loved the romance of trains,' he says. 'I found myself thinking: there's a play in that.'

Fast forward two years and David Hare's The Permanent Way receives its London premiere this week. Already it is one of the most talked-about plays currently on the stage: it opened last year in Yorkshire to rave reviews and has since toured the country. It is, as Stafford-Clark wryly agrees, ironic that a play that sounds so dull on paper - its characters include engineers, transport policemen and company executives - should be generating its own publicity so effortlessly.

'It's a state of the nation play,' he says. 'The incompetence, greed and corruption in our transport system symbolises something ill in modern Britain.'

The Permanent Way is no ordinary piece of theatre. It is a docudrama based on the testimonies of the people who work on the railways, from the men who maintain the track (known in the industry as the permanent way) to the executives who run the rail companies and the bankers who profited when the government sold them off - via the parents who lost children at Paddington and Hatfield.

Hare and Stafford-Clark, and their team of actors, interviewed numerous such people in the course of creating the play; the results are, in a sense, a theatrical public inquiry into the systematic and fatal break-up of a once great institution. 'We did feel more like journalists than artists,' Stafford-Clark says.

He is no stranger to this form of drama: in 1999 he directed Robin Soan's A State Affair, based on first-person interviews with the inhabitants of a Bradford housing estate. The Permanent Way comes on the back of Richard Norton-Taylor's Justifying War (in essence an edited version of the Hutton Inquiry) and The Colour Of Justice, a similar piece on the Stephen Lawrence case. In this age of constant news, it seems we have an insatiable hunger for a similarly explicit realism in theatre.

Stafford-Clark agrees. 'When we first performed the play in Yorkshire, we held a debate after the performance for members of the audience to air their thoughts,' he says.

'We were amazed by the number of people who turned up; people who worked for rail companies and who had never been to the theatre before. There was a real sense that they felt this play was directly about them.