Staged a few minutes away from Grenfell Tower, this play drawn from the inquiry into the 2017 inferno that took 72 lives has audience members who experienced the disaster firsthand and have seen accountability avoided for causes and responses. “They’ve got away with it,” a survivor sitting close to me says in the interval. The system, they add, “is not set up for us”.
That’s why the official inquiry – bringing truth to light and due to report later this year – is so crucial. Since 1994, writer Richard Norton-Taylor and director Nicolas Kent have created a series of forensic tribunal plays. Grenfell: Value Engineering (2021) distilled the inquiry’s first phase; this follow-up details the endemic responsibility dodging – commercial and regulatory – that nurtured calamity. A civil servant claims “fire safety is a very subjective subject”; petulant Lord Pickles (played by Howard Crossley) huffs at interrogation.
Questioning is led by Richard Millett, counsel to the inquiry. Ron Cook, a terrier of an actor, gets his teeth into squirming and stonewalling witnesses, quoting damning group chats (“all we do is lie in here”) or insisting that “science was secretly perverted for financial gain”. Regulators, research bodies, government – all swerve apology or responsibility until pressed.
The play text’s afterword quotes Millett’s excoriating closing speech about the pervasive buck-passing: “the merry-go-round turns still”. Norton-Taylor and Kent choose to let audiences draw their own conclusions, so don’t stage this speech. Theirs is an almost anti-theatrical theatre. Its setting is bland wood and grey flooring, its language is sober. Rare striking phrases resound: a barrister declaring that lives “cannot be sacrificed at the altar of austerity” or a fire chief lamenting “an article of public shame”.
The previous play didn’t feature testimony from the bereaved. Here, we hear a feeling account read by Tanveer Ghani about “Saber” Neda, who lost his life after turning back to help his neighbours, and the play is bookended with evidence from Hisam Choucair (Shahzad Ali). He describes how his search for his family was unaided, even obstructed, and is the only witness to suggest racism as a factor. He also questions the missing accountability: “how these crooks are still hiding”.
Grenfell: System Failure is at the Playground theatre, London, until 25 February; the Tabernacle, London, 27 February-12 March; and Marylebone theatre, London, 14-26 March.
