There’s a quiet rage simmering at the National Theatre. Perhaps too quiet. At the end of Gillian Slovo’s new Grenfell Tower play, Grenfell: in the Words of Survivors, actors playing survivors silently lead the audience out of the playhouse and into the night. The cast hold versions of the papier-mache hearts that have come to symbolise the west London community’s solidarity in loss. As everyone shuffles out, the theatre’s concrete walls are bathed in green light.
It’s a theatrical gambit that gives playgoers a taste of the silent march that takes place on the 14th of every month around the streets at the base of the burnt-out tower, bringing hundreds of the bereaved, survivors and residents back together.
But after Slovo’s play you might not want to be silent. You might want to shout. Art can possess an extraordinary power to clarify, and so it was here. It struck me more strongly than ever that, more than six years since the disaster that killed 72 people, there has not been a single significant arrest; civil compensation claims so far agreed amount to a relative pittance, and a public inquiry report is now not expected until 2024, three years later than originally hoped. Elsewhere, tower blocks are still covered in similar combustible materials.
The hundreds of people whose homes were destroyed, or who lost children, parents and friends, remain in a terrible purgatory. We have had four prime ministers, a pandemic has come and gone, and the world has changed. And still they wait for justice. Many say its delay actively prevents them from getting on with the rest of their lives.
Slovo’s play exposes, by implication, the cruelty in how the UK authorities have chosen to deliver a reckoning. It is not didactic, but captures the full breadth of the Grenfell catastrophe using a verbatim script. Ten actors play 10 survivors, their words taken from interviews. Acting out key moments from the public inquiry, they double up as construction materials salespeople, fire fighters, landlord executives and a fire safety regulator.
No angle goes uncovered: the tenants’ treatment by their landlord before the fire, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s gentrification drive, its cost-cutting, how the regulatory system failed to prevent combustible materials from coming to market, the unprepared fire brigade, and David Cameron’s anti-regulation drive.
Slovo invites the audience to meet the residents as rounded humans. We are introduced to Nicholas Burton, who lost his dear wife, Pily, and Waitrose manager Natasha Elcock, falling asleep on her sofa watching TV.
Their accounts of life in Grenfell – from children playing pranks to the terrifying reality of the burning tower – are interleaved with shocking testimony from the inquiry. It creates an arresting dialogue. The obfuscation of the legal process is erased, allowing the drama to pose the question: how much more evidence do police and prosecutors need?
Even in our sclerotic Westminster politics, there remains a measure of timely justice. Boris Johnson lies to parliament about having Downing Street parties? Gone. Liz Truss tanks the economy? Gone. But kill 72 people through negligence, mendacity and greed? Well, nothing. Yet.
The US materials company whose subsidiary manufactured the plastic-filled aluminium composite panels that were the main cause of fire spread, has hardly broken stride. Civil claims against it and other parties have been settled out of court for a reported total of £150m. The amount set aside last year in anticipation of that agreement amounted to less than 0.7% of the materials company turnover.
Kensington and Chelsea council (RBKC), which owned the tower and oversaw the disastrous refurbishment, committed itself, after the fire, to becoming “the best council for our communities” . But when it asked residents this April if the council had changed in the years since Grenfell, 62% said it had remained the same or got worse.
Then last week it emerged that materials made by the manufacturer of some of the combustible insulation used on Grenfell, had been installed during fire-safety works to two nearby council blocks despite an earlier ban by RBKC. The community was disgusted. With no justice, it is all exhausting for the Grenfell community.
Behind this delayed justice lies a 2019 agreement between the Metropolitan police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) that “the police investigation must take into account any findings or reports” produced by the Grenfell Tower inquiry, because without them , any criminal investigation would not be “thorough and complete”.
Survivors say they were originally informed that the inquiry and police work would be separate. When the two were fused, Scotland Yard anticipated a timetable that would allow it to make charging recommendations as soon as 2021. Now that the inquiry report is not expected until 2024, the consequences of that initial decision are starting to feel grotesque.
Martin Hewitt, outgoing chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, who was one of the lead Grenfell investigators early on, in March described the delay as “upsetting and wrong”. It hasn’t escaped the attention of one Grenfell survivor, Ed Daffarn, that a criminal trial in Italy over the collapse of a road bridge that killed 43 people in Genoa 10 months after Grenfell is already well under way.
None of this restores faith in the Metropolitan police. Justice for the victims and survivors is the main concern, but there is unfairness, too, in letting potential criminal charges hang over everyone involved in the project for longer than necessary. Some innocent lives are in limbo on that side of the tragedy, too.
Near the end of the play, the real Hanan Wahabi speaks to the audience from a big screen. Her eldest brother, Abdulaziz, 52, a hospital porter, his wife, Faouzia, 42, and children Yasin, 20, Nur Huda, 15, and Mehdi, eight, all died lying close together in their 21st-floor flat.
“I would like to see justice,” she says. “And I would like you to help us, to help us to remember, to never forget what happened and to create that change.” It is time, she says, to “press that domino”. It is time, too, to bring charges.
• This article was amended on 24 July 2023 to correct a picture credit for an embedded image.
Robert Booth is social affairs correspondent of the Guardian
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