Theatre director Max Stafford-Clark and playwright David Hare have a long association. Charles Hutchinson looks at their latest collaboration.

MAX Stafford-Clark, director, and David Hare, playwright, go back a long way.

In 1971, Stafford-Clark directed Hare's first play, Slag, at the Royal Court; in 1974, they co-founded Joint Stock, the most agit-prop theatre company of its day.

For 25 years, however, their careers took divergent paths, Stafford-Clark running the Royal Court, Hare writing for the National Theatre.

However, prompted by directing a Hare play in Sydney, Stafford-Clark asked him if he would consider doing a new play together for his Out Of Joint company. That play, a blow-by-blow account of the impact of rail privatisation entitled The Permanent Way, will be premiered at York Theatre Royal next week.

"Ian Jack, the editor of Granta magazine, had written this article about the state of the railways, which I sent to David, and that was the starting point, about a year ago," recalls Max.

"We started working on it last November and did a workshop in February at the National Theatre studio, where we investigated the decade since privatisation by talking to executives and the track people who worked on the Permanent Way gang, and the play was built up from there." The Permanent Way gang also gave Hare his title.

Stafford-Clark is an enthusiast of documentary dramas, and indeed his last premiere in Yorkshire, A State Affair, brought him to Bradford to research life on the Buttershaw estate two decades on from Rita, Sue And Bob Too, the Andrea Dunbar play he had directed in its first production.

"A State Affair sparked my interest in this kind of work," says Max, who also had been impressed by Richard Norton Taylor's stage re-creation of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, The Colour Of Justice.

That Norton Taylor piece had made its mark on Hare too, and Stafford-Clark is delighted to forge links anew with the socialist playwright.

"His energy and enthusiasm are infectious and exciting, and he's so astute. Of all the writers I have worked with, he and Caryl Churchill have the most theatrical brains," says Max. "I have tended to work with writers much younger than I am, but it's also good to work with someone of David's age." Hare, by the way, is 56.

Working in the arts, Stafford-Clark and Hare alike are always seeking new challenges.

"You want to renew yourself," says Max. "All of us, whether a writer, actor or director, want to challenge ourselves in new ways. After his years at the National Theatre, he's turning to a touring company such as Out Of Joint as a way to re-define himself, and that's something he feels he needs to do.

"It's not that the approach to telling the story is different, but the scale is different when you're not writing for the Lyttelton theatre at the National. The Permanent Way is a company piece, an ensemble piece without stars, so it's a touring piece for a touring company."

The play's poster of a smoke-spouting steam train triggers thoughts of happier train times, but do not judge a book by its cover. "The state of the railways is an emotional subject and that poster does evoke the golden age of steam, but I am a rail enthusiast and I don't find it a bad way to travel. This play is not a hatchet job: we did meet some executives who were very engaged in trying to improve rail travel."

The Permanent Way will seek to tell the tale of a dream gone sour from both sides of the tracks, starting next week in the railway city of York.

The Permanent Way, Out Of Joint, York Theatre Royal, November 13 to 15, 7.30pm nightly plus 2.30pm Saturday matinee. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 10:17 Friday, November 07, 2003