Out of Joint Premieres Hare's New Permanent WayDate: 8 October 2003
Out of Joint will premiere David Hare's hotly anticipated new play, about Britain's modern rail disaster, on tour this autumn ahead of a London season at the National Theatre in 2004 (See The Goss, 7 Jul 2003). The Permanent Way opens on 13 November 2003 at the Theatre Royal in York, home of the National Railway Museum, and then continues until 22 May 2004 to a dozen more venues, including the NT Cottesloe where it will have a four-month run from 6 January to 1 May 2004 (See News, 7 Oct 2003).
Billed as an "extraordinary parable of British mismanagement", The Permanent Way is based on first-hand accounts with those most closely involved in the privatisation that, since 1991, has brought about the UK's modern transport chaos.
Kika Markham (Homebody/Kabul, Song at Twilight features in the cast which also includes Fleminia Cinque, Nigel Cooke, Matthew Dunster, Souad Faress, Sam Graham, Lloyd Hutchinson, Bella Merlin and Ian Redford.
The Permanent Way will be directed by OJO artistic director Max Stafford-Clark and designed by the award-winning William Dudley (whose recent 3-D sets have been seen in Hitchcock Blonde and, at the National, The Coast of Utopia).
The co-production between Out of Joint and the National marks a reunion for Hare in more ways than one. It will be his first play since 1997's Amy's View that will presented at the National, where he was once a regular before what he's described as the "exile" years of former artistic director Trevor Nunn. It will also be his first collaboration with Stafford-Clark, formerly of the Royal Court, since Fanshen in 1975.
Following York, The Permanent Way will visit Birmingham, Exeter, Bath, Newcastle, Lincoln, Cornwall, Hatfield, London, Lees, Oxford and Liverpool. The schedule includes special one-off performances at schools and churches.
- by Terri Paddock
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