During dramas about a national catastrophe – in films such as Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough (1996) and Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) – viewers have the sickening sense of watching real people doomed to die horribly. A variant comes in the National Theatre’s exploration of the 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower in west London that took 72 lives and devastated hundreds more. The subtitle reveals that the nine residents depicted all got out.
It begins with the lights up as the cast, out of character, explain that if the content overwhelms us, we can leave and return. No images or sounds of fire will be used and the residents dramatised have consented to the words used having been taken from interviews with novelist and writer Gillian Slovo.
