SIR David Hare has returned to his favourite blood sport, baiting governments with a political drama.

His personal inquiry into the farce cum tragedy of rail privatisation is not, however, his best play or much of a play at all.

Hare planted his theatrical roots in agit-prop soil, blooming initially with director Max Stafford-Clark, with whom he now re-unites for the first time since their Fanshen collaboration in 1975.

Both these British theatre luminaries were in York last night for that rarity: a night when the Theatre Royal was the venue for the theatrical event of the week, a Hare premiere being launched in the railway city for three days en route to the National Theatre.

It was at the National that Hare presented his State of the Nation trilogy on the Church, the law and the Labour Party. Now, after a period of more introspective works, he is examining the body politic once more and partaking in that time-honoured British pastime: moaning about rail travel.

Hare had researched The Permanent Way in tandem with the Out Of Joint cast, and the ensemble nature of this documentary drama is established immediately in the play's most theatrical, choreographed sequence on designer William Dudley's set of station and track paraphernalia.

The scene involves already frazzled commuters, each with a newspaper, spouting irrational thoughts on a crammed Tube train, scrambling over each to make the same point: Britain should be great; it isn't, we know it isn't but nobody has the will to stop the decline. This was the satirical stuff of Bird and Fortune, or of one of those Radio 4 6.30pm shows, and each knockout blow received a burst of applause, much like the play's opening moment when a railway poster came to video life as a steam train suddenly starting moving up the line.

That screen scene was to be mirrored later by an altogether more horrifying image: the sight and sound of a graphic of the Hatfield crash: the third in the damning sequence of Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield and Potters Bar; each fatal route charted on a timetable board that left a fifth line blank for the next tragedy.

The Permanent Way shifts from amusing irrational ranting to documentary-rational dissection, the cast enacting the verbatim testimonies of crash survivors, the bereaved, Treasury mandarins and rail bosses, complemented by a running joke at the expense of an oafish, caricatured John Prescott.

However, just as rail privatisation fell down over divisions of safety and profit, wheel and rail, engineering and management, so The Permanent Way falls down over the division between drama and information overload. Where Richard Norton Taylor's play on the Stephen Lawrence inquiry had only one focus, here it is spread, and consequently rather than a play, we have a treatise in which Hare concludes that corruption rules; blame culture is rife, so no one admits responsibility; and the British lack a sense of commune.

Hare doesn't make drama out of the crisis, but as a middle-aged study of muddle-age Britain and the alarming divide between political force and the will of the people, his railway play is just the ticket.

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Updated: 10:51 Friday, November 14, 2003