At last, the grossly over-rated playwright Sir David Hare is being put on the spot. His latest play The Permanent Way (which I have not seen), a blast against rail privatisation, is playing to packed houses at the National Theatre. Now it has been roundly attacked by rail industry executives. Well, they would, wouldn't they. But however self-serving their justifications may be against many of the criticisms made by an understandably irate public, the fundamental point they make is correct. Key passage:

'Adrian Lyons, director general of the Railway Forum, an industry lobby group, wrote to Sir David before opening night asking him to correct the play’s central message that privatisation had made the railways dangerous. Mr Lyons pointed out that the rate of train crashes had halved since BR was broken up and sold off in 1994-96. While the privatised industry had suffered a series of high-profile crashes at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar, none had resulted in as many casualties as the disaster at Clapham in 1988, in which 35 people had died.'

Since the driving point of the play appears to be that privatisation was responsible for rail accidents and deaths, this would appear to be a pretty damning blow to Hare's credibility. These critics also accuse him of taking comments they made in interviews out of context to present a misleading view, and then refusing to anser their questions 'just like one of the scheming politicians he portrays.'

The charge of manipulating information is particularly damaging because the play purports to be not a work of the imagination but a kind of drama-documentary. As the Times observes: 'The playwright claims the drama has attained the highest "level of truthfulness" because he and the theatre company conducted dozens of interviews with railwaymen and train crash victims.'

Quite apart from the veracity or mendacity of his representation, this whole approach calls into question Hare's reputation as a playwright of any stature. Time after time now, his work -- albeit entertaining and witty in part -- has been deeply disappointing because of its agit-prop quality, which reduces it to little more than a kind of animated New Statesman column. As Stephen Pollard writes also in the Times, Sir David is a saloon-bar bore of the boards:

'There seems to be no left-liberal cliché which escapes Sir David’s attentions. His current play, The Permanent Way — in which he uses transcribed interviews to show the evils of rail privatisation — is merely the latest in a long line. Since his first outing at the National Theatre, Plenty, he has delivered a series of plays all with one thing in common: a slavish adherence to the left-liberal received wisdom of the day. Plenty was about a French Resistance fighter who becomes — as if you couldn’t guess — disillusioned with Britain. Pravda was about nasty, brutish press barons, Racing Demon the cynicism of the Church, Murmuring Judges the deformities of the legal system, and The Absence of War the betrayal of the Left by modernising Labour politicians.'

I think Stephen is a little harsh. When Hare puts his ideological fixations to one side and concentrates on character, as he did in Plenty, The Silent Rapture and even Racing Demon, his work takes life. But much of the rest is, frankly, risible and tedious. Stephen also makes a broader and more disturbing point:

'The rise of Sir David, and the Establishment’s veneration of him, symbolise what is so wrong with the artistic life of the country. Can you think of a single play dealing with, even on the loosest definition of the word, a political issue, which has been commissioned by the National Theatre — or indeed by any subsidised theatre — which does not come at its audience directly from the Left? Of course you can’t. Even to ask the question is ridiculous. And that does not cover directors’ habit of imposing their own agendas on existing plays. Last year’s National production of Henry V was not about Henry V but, as the director put it, the “dubious legitimacy” of the Iraq war (as opposed, one presumes, to the obvious legitimacy of a subsidised theatre pushing an explicit political agenda in its productions).

'When Sir David and those of his ilk put their political beliefs into the form of their characters, they claim that they are giving an issue breadth and depth. What they usually do, however, is to sterilise debate with caricatured portrayals of evil, money-obsessed capitalists. Power, money and status are almost always, in their world-view, to be despised.

'Fine. Sir David is as entitled to his views as the rest of us, and to test the success of his plays alongside all-comers. What he should not be entitled to do is peddle his views at our expense, as the beneficiary of a funding mechanism which refuses to allow any alternative to show its head.'

Again, I demur slightly in that I thought that production of Henry V was magnificent. But the general point is bang on. Along with the BBC and the universities, the conformism of the theatre (and not just the subsidised bit) dramatises the stranglehold of noxious ideas on our intellectual life.

Posted by melanie at February 11, 2004