Acting Hare under the direction of Max Stafford-Clark must be akin to playing a Beethoven sonata conducted by Simon Rattle: so sure are the hands in which you find yourself as a performer, it is nigh on impossible for your 'instrument' to sound out of tune. In the course of this chapter, I explore my involvement with Hare's play The Permanent Way, a co-production between Stafford-Clark's Out of Joint theatre company and the National Theatre, London. However, the structuring and writing of The Permanent Way was not necessarily the way in which Hare would traditionally work: far from being a solitary task, the process of assembling the material included a number of actor-researchers, as well as the director himself. Indeed, my own involvement with the play began with the early research in February 2003, when I first met Hare, and continued through to the production's final performance in Sydney during March 2005.

I begin by concentrating on the collation of the original material, and thereafter examine the ethical issues involved in a play that essentially draws upon living people’s accounts – an area which particularly provoked both me and Hare – and the impact on the acting choices raised by those issues.